The first thing that I always hear from businesses is that they do not have integrated systems because of COST and the the effect of resource consumption. The biggest resource consumption that you can save on is your employees time. To be able to put an end to swivel chair technology in your business will not only save you time and money, but will ensure that one of your business most important asset (your business data) is kept valid and clean. Your business should be driving to get all your systems integrated as much as possible to leverage the existing processes, people, technology and information that you have. Security is another another important factor why system integration is important to businesses. If your business uses many systems in its day to day operations then integrating those systems should be at the top of your IT’s implementation goals.

What integrating your business systems can mean to you:

  • Better Management of Information: If your systems are not integrated it is impossible to get a complete picture of how your business is doing. When you have several systems that you are inputting data, some of those systems will be out of sync for longer periods of time especially during high traffic times of sales or as your business starts really to scale up. So what that means different managers in different departments that are using different systems are not seeing the same picture.
  • Higher Productivity: Dealing with many different standalone systems can consume time and with employees manually entering data into these systems (swivel chair tech) that is time be wasted when those employees can be redirected to higher priorities. Not only is this type of process time consuming but has the potential of creating bad data as employee can enter different information in each system. The scalability and expansion that system integration can give your business for growth can be achieved without adding more employees, so what does that mean. Well that means as your business increase so does your profitability.
  • Cost Savings: The return on investment (ROI) that you will see not having to manage the data input for multiple systems will be seen extremely fast, what you will also notice is that you data will be cleaner and all the different different departments will be seeing the same picture at the same time.
  • Greater Customer Satisfaction: Having multiple systems that are not integrated can mean that it can take extra time to fulfill your clients orders as well as respond to their enquiries or complaints. Nothing can increase customer satisfaction more like real time data flow between your systems.
  • Improved Security: Most businesses deal with some type of sensitive information that requires protection. By integrating your systems, you can easily build in the security tools necessary to prevent access by unauthorized users. Integrated systems will also help your business keep access to other systems to only the employees that need it, lowering the potential of issues and security threats.
  • If you are one of those businesses that is thinking can I really afford to integrate my systems, think about it this way can you really afford not to integrate. Integrating systems does not have to be done all at once, it can be a phased approach keeping cost a little more spread out while seeing the benefits and savings sooner.

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