The unpredictable times today necessitate businesses to stay flexible in the face of unexpected threats. Building organisational resilience is critical for companies to prevent disruptions or minimise their effects.
To anticipate, adapt, and respond to such unfavorable conditions, businesses must ingrain a specific set of values along with the right kind of technological integration. Technology integration brings day-to-day operational workflows close, which in turn helps organisations become resilient.
But how do you integrate technology and harmonise workflows? An Integrated Business Management System (IBMS) is the answer to this question and more.
By integrating applications, you get a unified version of all business tools, processes, and data, ensuring everyone in the organisation remains informed to make key decisions. Let’s explore in detail how an IBMS works and how it enables businesses to stay resilient to short- or long-term disruptions.
What is an IBMS?
An IBMS is a collection of web and mobile apps that manage the interdependent parts of your business. It’s a single system or a “business suite” that allows the business apps to share the same database. These integrated apps transform data into structured information that serves as a “single source of truth” for all the departments.
This enables your teams to make data-driven decisions confidently. Moreover, since an IBMS keeps all the processes closely intertwined, it also becomes easier to monitor and control each process as and when needed.
How an IBMS Helps in Organisational Resilience
In the digital era, an IBMS is tremendously helpful in keeping various processes aligned. It helps build resilience to ensure business continuity in the event of disruptions. All organisations need a deeper understanding of the operations across every business function and department. An IBMS gives business leaders a complete view of the organisation’s overall operations.
The integrated system helps you manage the core seven components of any business, i.e., People, Assets, Finance, Time, Collaboration, Information, and Governance, or PAFTCIG for short. Let’s find out how IBMS manages these components by leveraging a central information repository.
People
IBMS manages people, both within the organisation and external prospects, through integrated mobile and web-based applications. Whether it be HR management, salary distribution, performance appraisals, or vendor relations, the dedicated app for managing people empowers the HR department with the necessary insights.
The app equips the team with the right tools to help you shape a responsive workforce ready to react to crises efficiently.
Assets
Integrating business information makes it possible to track and list all tangible and intangible assets. It becomes easy to supervise and control maintenance planning, inventory, or facility management through data centralization. A dedicated asset management application provides valuable insights into how the assets perform, maintenance requirements, and capital expenditure.
With real-time information about the entire value chain, stakeholders can establish strategic priorities to reduce risk, deliver performance consistently, and develop resilience against short- or long-term disruptions.
Finance
A finance-related IBMS application enables seamless collaboration with other departmental applications, allowing businesses to run costing, budgeting, and analytics processes with centralized, thoughtful, and reliable data.
Time
IBMS also simplifies task management, project management, and scheduling through calendars, GANTT, and Kanban. Time allocation through data-driven decisions and comprehensive charts make work lively while providing effective resilience against disruptions that may affect overall organisational performance.
Collaboration
As a part of IBMS, teams also get access to an integrated communication app that instills an improved, consistent, and collaborative experience. Whether file sharing, voice and video conferencing, or live meetings, the IBMS app for collaboration enables seamless and secure communication even for remote teams.
Information
IBMS apps promote a data-driven culture within the organisation by providing a single source of truth for teams. This reliable data instills trust within people, encouraging them to make decisions based on data rather than intuition. A dedicated dashboard app also offers decision-makers easy to interpret insights that they can quickly act on. Intelligent dashboards also allow stakeholders to anticipate disruptions and provide recommendations to mitigate risk areas and ensure business continuity.
Governance
Governance plays a fundamental role in enabling enterprises to stay on track with the efficient handling of data. IBMS app for governance helps build organisational resilience against data breaches, unauthorized access, and compliance management failures. The app allows leaders to define roles and responsibilities to limit the access of sensitive business information only to those authorized.
Key Benefits of an IBMS
An IBMS provides a comprehensive interface for all enterprise data, making managerial tasks less toilsome while building organisational resilience. Leveraging an IBMS for everyday tasks will allow decision-makers to focus on more important things such as policymaking, investment, or expansion.
Key benefits of an IBMS include:
Cost and Time efficiency
Implementation and maintenance of an IBMS are both cost-friendly and time-efficient. Since everything is stored in a single database, the auditing or review process becomes fast and effortless. Moreover, an IBMS captures business processes through a single interface, eliminating the need for multiple siloed systems to monitor individual operations.
In a difficult situation such as disruptions resulting from natural disasters or losing a key customer, an organisation needs to mold itself to incur minimal damage. With an IBMS, it is possible to implement preventive measures across all departments and reduce financial losses and recovery time.
Improved Performance
Integrated applications make routine procedures faster and more systematic through collaboration. For instance, IBMS consolidates processes such as forecasting, invoicing, inventory, or supply chain management by transforming a broad spectrum of enterprise data into logical and actionable insights. This availability of reliable and structured data allows executives to act quickly and make well-informed decisions, boosting the overall productivity and profitability of the organisation.
Consistency with Minimal Dependencies
No matter the process, integrated management applications function in the same ecosystem and share a similar interface. A single source of easily accessible data eliminates multiple hardware and software dependencies. Harmonised systems and shared processes reduce complexity and align separate functions reasonably and coherently.
An IBMS gives business leaders a holistic view of all departments and functions within the organisation. They can build dashboards and reports that’d have been previously impossible. For instance, CEOs can build a report to see the critical info they want to see from every department within the organisation.
Data Governance and Compliance
Data governance practices help manage the availability, utility, safety, and integrity of an organisation’s valuable data throughout its lifecycle. Businesses can set rigorous data governance emphasis through an IBMS to manage data effectively. Data is a sensitive asset that needs to be stored and handled considering data privacy and compliance laws and regulations. An IBMS comes with compliance control options, making it easier for businesses to abide by these laws.
Fostering Organisational Resilience with ContinuSys IBMS
An IBMS doesn’t just present a technology solution for disconnected, rigid organisations. It brings a fundamental and holistic shift in mindset, management, and operations. It empowers organisations to handle disruption more strongly - whether it is a financial or people issue or something more catastrophic like a natural disaster or a cybercrime.
The ContinuSys IBMS is a set of web and mobile applications that preserve data in a single virtual database hosted securely on the Amazon Web Services platform. With better grounds for decision-making, intelligent workflows, and collaboration between departments, every single aspect of running a business becomes simple and governable from anywhere.
The ContinuSys IBMS solution is relevant for businesses of all sizes, especially those looking forward to operating progressively with resilience in today’s unpredictable market situation.
Contact us to learn more about the capabilities of ContinuSys IBMS or register for a free trial today!