When you start building your software, the aim isn’t to make it patchy. It’s a gradual creep you don’t realize is occurring. A new software tool here and an upgrade there. All too easy to do. But forgetting to check what you already have before stacking a new one results in increased operational issues, confusion and mistakes. All of which you could probably do without and will be just hindering your capabilities, not actually benefiting you the way they’re supposed to be.
But how do you avoid this? Because new tools hit the market all the time, and while they have the potential to make your life easier, do you need them? Before you start randomly adding in software, let’s take a look at the real cost to your business when you’re running on patchwork software.
Duplicate Subscription Costs
This one is kind of embarrassing when you pull all of the costs together. Because you’re likely not realizing how much these types of subscriptions are costing you, you’re likely just looking for potential benefits, right?
The truth is, while each purchase might have been justified at the time, right now there’s probably not a clear picture of the whole truth. Finance will see the accounting costs, IT the infrastructure and operations know what’s going on day to day, but not one department has complete oversight and visibility. And that means that costs and the waste compounds grow in the background, costing you time and money.
Time Lost to Manual Data Entry
If any of the systems or software you’re using requires people to manually enter details, then you’re already losing time and functionality. The result isn’t things being ineffective; it’s already broken. The deal with tools and software is that they’re there to make life easier. Having people manually input data or copying it from one software to another removes the effectiveness of the tool entirely in most cases.
Let’s say you have a warehouse manager who manually inputs the stock count every day and exports a fulfillment report. Your finance team then re-enters supplier information as the procurement tool doesn’t push through to the accounting platform. Then the operations manager cross-references these systems each Monday to produce a report that really should be updated automatically.
It’s time wasted on repetitive actions that should really be occurring automatically. You need to check if all of your systems are compatible with each other and can connect to reduce manual logging. Or alternatively, shift over to a system that covers all those major moving parts you need in one. An Odoo Gold Partner company can help you move your software and set it up in one system that handles everything, reducing the time lost to manual data entry.
Data Keying Errors
Humans make mistakes. While you want people to be perfect, the truth is they’re not perfect 100% of the time. Even if someone is extremely good at their job, they’re not always infallible.
All it takes is for one cell to be filled incorrectly, one digit in a cost to be entered wrong, and everything is thrown out. They might seem like minor issues, but they can massively impact operations and finances massively especially if they’re not caught fast and corrected. Things will compound until you need to dedicate time to sorting it out.
An integrated system will remove this entirely. You’ve got fewer manual entry points for things to be incorrect, and errors can be picked up quickly, reducing incorrect invoices, wrong stock counts, missed shipments, etc.
Lost Sales from Inventory Sync Failures
If you’re operating across multiple sales channels, for example, wholesale accounts, a direct website, marketplace listings, physical retail, and so on, real-time inventory isn’t a nice feature to have; it’s the difference between a functioning operation and one that’s constantly firefighting.
What happens when your systems don’t sync is that you oversell stock you don’t have, leading to increased refunds and customer complaints, or you’ll turn away orders for stock that’s sitting in the warehouse when your systems think you’re out and don’t have the volume to make the sales.
Both of these problems cost you money and can be damaging in more ways than one, and once you’ve hit this point, it’s a slippery slope back to gaining control and trust from your customer base.
Slower Employee Onboarding
When you take on new staff, you need them to be fully competent as fast as possible. That’s a given, and if you’re training people across different platforms in different ways, and you’re having to double back to see who is up to where or what’s been skipped. Not only is this impacting your productivity, but their employment and training too. This is before we mention their ability to work to the standards you need them to.
Mistakes in fragmented systems are much harder to capture, and standards will slip. If you have one consolidated platform for training that’s integrated with other software, such as HR, accounting, etc., employees get up to speed faster, and nothing is missed.
No Single Financial Overview
This is really important as businesses with poor cash flow fail faster than those that have a complete picture of what is going on financially. And if your financial records are scattered across multiple systems – some in an accounting tool, some in a CRM, a procurement tool and anything else you have — this makes getting a complete and accurate picture difficult.
When everything is held in different places, you’re relying on people pulling it together and risking increased mistakes and oversights when this happens.
Ideally, you need accounting, inventory, purchasing and sales all running on the same platform. This gives you live, accurate data available to those who need it at any given time without scrambling to pull the right figures from different places.
Poor Decision Making
If things aren’t centralized, then you’re not going to be able to produce full, detailed reports, and if you don’t have this information to hand, then you’re making decisions with only half the picture in front of you. And poor decisions in business lead to mistakes everyone knows this.
To make solid decisions grounded in data and evidence, you need information that is current, not from weeks ago. You need real time data that helps you first understand if a supplier is working out for you or anything else that relies on having the right facts to make important decisions. Fragmented systems don’t offer this.
