Irrespective of whether an organisation is small or large, every business comprises five fundamental and interdependent businesses processes: value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery and finance. We can further break down these five parts of a business into ten core processes:
- Marketing
- Human Resources
- Governance
- Financial Analysis
- Management
- Sales
- Product/Service Development
- Product/Service Delivery
- Accounting
- Technology
The performance of an enterprise depends largely on how well these processes are defined and complement each other. Today, when business usually happens through digital mediums, keeping these processes efficient and connected means using the right digital infrastructure. Unfortunately, that is where most growing organisations struggle due to their siloed business management architecture.
The Problems with Siloed Business Management Architecture
Businesses often begin using a few productivity solutions to get things done efficiently. But as they grow, they need more such solutions to tackle their complex processes. This growing number of tools eventually turns into an entangled web of a wide range of applications, systems and databases. Most of these systems do not connect natively, leaving data silos across the value chain. As more people and new processes add up, the data silos become more complex.
With such a disconnected architecture, things get missed, and information between departments likely gets lost. Disparate tools further lead to duplicate efforts of employees in generating key business insights. Instead of data-driven decisions, judgement happens based on intuition or past experience. Overlapping databases from these applications offer no-real time visibility into the processes, causing inefficiencies that ultimately cripple growth.
As a last resort to save the organisation from doom and destruction, the IT department finds itself spending wasteful hours integrating all the disparate apps to make sense of data for all the departments. However, in this process, they end up increasing the maintenance cost.
To ensure organisational resilience against these challenges, improve productivity and business growth, most forward-thinking enterprises are now turning to Integrated Business Management Systems or IBMS.
What is Integrated Business Management System (IBMS)?
An Integrated Business Management System (IBMS) is a collection of web and mobile apps that manage the interdependent parts of your business. It is a single system or a “business suite” that allows the business apps to share the same database. These integrated software applications transform data into structured information that serves as a “single source of truth” for all the departments.
The Benefits of IBMS
When you have trustworthy data and a uniform interface for everyone to use, decision-making becomes more accurate, employee productivity improves and processes turn more efficient. IBMS builds organisational resilience against inefficiencies and brings numerous other business benefits. Let’s explore some of them.
Improves Process Efficiency across Your Enterprise
With integrated software, day-to-day business operations happen quickly and efficiently. Your teams no longer require spending time extracting data from different sources to make decisions. Whether it is about order management, invoicing, collaboration or meetings, IBMS apps make reliable data readily available to everyone, enabling them to make more accurate and faster decisions. Moreover, the integrated ecosystem also facilitates the extraction of hidden or under-utilised data that teams can use to take strategic initiatives and drive innovation.
Offers Real-time Visibility
Disparate systems lead to overlapping databases that make it challenging to extract real-time information critical to business performance, such as sales, marketing, and finance reports. With integrated business applications, this visibility improves dramatically. Information is readily available, and stakeholders can access it almost instantly from anywhere, anytime. For example, with real-time data on inventory, it gets easier to quickly spot risks or trends within the supply chain.
Eliminates Multiple Software and Hardware Dependencies
IBMS facilitates data sharing among all the business management applications. Besides, the app ecosystem features a similar interface and navigation compared to multiple systems, providing better accessibility to anyone. Since integration ties together all the software dependencies, data synchronisation, data duplication or compatibility is no longer an issue. The integrated ecosystem will also prevent your IT department from wasting time bringing together disparate applications and maintaining them.
Reduces Operational Cost
When there are no multiple systems to install, integrate and maintain, you'll realise significant cost savings in IT that you can divert to improve your business operations. Your IT department can focus on other high-value activities that create value for your business.
Better Business Growth
Compared to siloed systems and applications, IBMS makes it easy for you to scale your business. Whether you need to expand your workforce or extend your business to multiple locations, everyone will have access to the same reliable information. Integration will also make it easier for departments to share data. For example, marketing teams can utilise existing sales data to upsell/cross-sell products/services more efficiently and effectively.
The five interdependent parts of an organisation and its 10 core business processes can be effectively managed using the ContinuSys Integrated Business Management System (C-IBMS)
Bring Everything Together with ContinuSys and Enhance Your Business Efficiency
In a digital era, most companies use sophisticated applications to improve their efficiency and fuel growth. However, most of them struggle to realise growth due to disconnected systems that hamper employee productivity and create process inefficiencies. To succeed, organisations need to simplify and unify their business management systems. And, IBMS is a step in this direction. By bringing everything together, IBMS offers an opportunity to maximise the efficiency of your business, and in turn, realise profitable growth.
The ContinuSys App ecosystem is an IBMS designed to protect organisations from day-to-day or long term interruptions resulting from siloed applications and poor management of people, asset, finance and time. Data from all ContinuSys apps get stored in a single database, and this one database also facilitates data sharing between the apps.
With an ecosystem of integrated apps, ContinuSys IBMS effectively manages people, assets, finance, time, collaboration, information and governance components of any business. IBMS like ContinuSys eliminate the performance bottlenecks associated with disconnected systems and help businesses to increase efficiency and profitability by exposing new information to current organisational knowledge.
Want to learn more about ContinuSys capabilities? Call us on +617 3184 4441 or reach out to us for a free demo.