It’s crucial to be able to integrate your core business departments into a single software package; doing so can help you to reduce downtime in terms of coordinating different files, and can also enable you to cut down on your overall software spending.
Taking this approach is also important if you want to enhance your customer relationship management and streamline communications across your business to consolidate various departments.
Some of the more general benefits associated with integrating your core business departments into a software solution include being able to increase compatibility between individual programs, whether that covers word processing, graphics, email, or spreadsheets. Integration can similarly be achieved on the level of web based and cloud applications, whereby you can simplify the process of logging tasks and handling customer information, increasing your overall productivity.
Recent surveys of business and IT managers demonstrate how combining enterprise applications and integrating different parts of a company network can add value to operations. The use of XML to streamline communications between web programs, and the deployment of EAI (enterprise application integration) strategies when budgeting for new programs can also be viewed here as increasingly important to making business departments more coordinated and easy to access.
In terms of improving customer relationship management and key performance indicators, integrating your departments around one software package can enable faster customer data retrieval and the ability to immediately bring up a history of past interactions when dealing with a query; this can be invaluable if you need to emphasise your knowledge and strong customer support, and can reduce the amount of internal network problems caused by using incompatible software.
It’s also possible to enhance your technical support levels by using a single software package for all of your departments; this can be achieved by ensuring that staff receive consistent information and training on how to implement different programs, and can prevent problems in terms of managing error reports and implementing changes to a system. Again, software integration can limit redundancies and improve communications across a business network. More general staff training can also be improved by ensuring that familiarity with one application can be extended across similarly designed tools and interfaces.
There are consequently many benefits to integrating your business departments through one single software package, which range from boosting your efficiency in dealing with data, through to making it easier to focus different departments on shared goals. You might also want to look into scalable solutions available within one software suite, as well as whether or not you’re more suited to cloud based apps compared to having a physical software suite that you can upload to different computers.
