Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy, edit and paste… Only to find out… something is wrong. Guess who's in for a long night? All too often, business leaders come to us with this challenge. After taking all the right steps—offering a great product/service, hiring the right people, and providing ample pay, benefits, and perks—they realize that something is amiss.
People are working hard, products are moving, and revenues are increasing. Everything might be looking good on paper, but something still feels off. Many wonder… Why does it take so long to get a report? How did we run out of this component? Why didn’t this decision pan out?
Even with the best product and service offerings, the most diligent staff, and a great management team to hold everything together, many businesses miss out on opportunities. Why? The answer is simple—nothing flows.
Warning Signs of the Siloed Business
If you're sick of manual processes and hand-keyed information keeping you in the office (or home office), maybe it's time to look at the real culprit: siloed systems. Siloed systems often trickle down to the rest of your business. Departments never end up on the same page, data is never accurate or up to date, and people spend more time emailing each other and fixing errors than they do on work.
Disjointed Sales
Sales has evolved in more ways than one. Yes, the buying process has changed in the past decade, but that’s not the only area. While a siloed path to the sale is a hinderance, silos in the configure-price-quote and quote to cash process are much more dangerous.
Even as you approach the last mile of the sales process, your potential customer is still just that—potential. This is an area where lost sales hurt the most, and it’s also an area where the customer expects responsiveness, speed, and accuracy. Siloed processes stand in the way.
Lost Sales, Disappointed Customers, Broken Trust
Say your sales team is about to close a deal. How long does it take everyone to build a quote, check the credit of a customer, make sure you have the capability to provide the products or services, finalize the contract and complete/account for the sale?
How many people does this involve? More importantly, how many emails does this involve?
A disjointed sales process leaves opportunity for leakage. If it’s taking days to build out a quote, an agile competitor can edge you out. If the quote isn’t accurate, you’re going to end up eating the loss or angering the customer. If you promise something you don’t have, you’ve broken the trust of your customer.
Workflows Reimagined: Connect the Dots, Close the Sale, Fulfill the Contract
All of this boils down to silos. If closing a sale requires dozens of emails to finance, treasury, warehouses or project managers, legal teams, and the like, you’re bound to run into this problem. Workflows matter, and this is an area where it’s easy to lose business waiting on an answer from one party.
A desiloed business will provide everyone in the process with the necessary information to build a quote, close the deal, and deliver on the contract. Finance, CRM, and inventory or project management integration makes this happen.
Broken Budgeting
Sales may be the path to growth, but far be it from the only area where silos stand in the way. Budgeting and planning season represents one of the most tense, politicized, and territorial times that leaders need to oversee.
But more often than not, budgeting is a mess of outdated formulas, mentalities, and emails that encourages tribalism and relies on backward-looking information.
Infighting, Inbox Cluttering, Inaccuracies, and Increased Risk
As you approach the budgeting season, what information do you need to provide and what information do you need to receive? How are you sending, receiving, and updating this information? Email and spreadsheet?
If you said yes, it’s safe to assume that your staff dreads the process. It’s safe to assume that you do as well. How many emails need to be sent during the budgeting and planning process? How many times do you need to backtrack because someone was working on an outdated budgeting spreadsheet?
Outdated, manual, and siloed budgeting is at best territorial and inconvenient. At worst? Fraud ridden. Unscrupulous individuals have the opportunity to sneak a few line items that may not make sense—but get approved anyway. Pair this with a backward-looking budgeting process and you ultimately end up spending money in the wrong areas—instead of ones that position your company for growth.
A Better Approach: Accurate, Growth-Focused Budgets
By connecting your organization’s budgeting process, you remove the inaccuracy and annoyance that goes into it. Imagine freeing yourself from the nested email threads and multiple spreadsheet versions. Replace formulaic budget templates with KPI-driven ones that give managers an opportunity to present ideas that grow the company. Drill down to understand why money is being requested.
With a desiloed budgeting process, you are able to declutter, collaborate, and focus on what’s best for the company. Everyone works in real time using a single source of truth.
Business Desiloed: Connected Processes, Connected Systems, and Connected Data With Acumatica
These are far from the only areas where siloed processes hold you back. Think of the most laborious processes in your business and ask yourself—what’s standing in the way? It’s not your people—it’s the processes and technologies.
How Cloud ERP Helps to Desilo Your Business
By freeing yourself from siloed departments, processes, and data, you give your team the freedom to think bigger. Rather than taking hours every week manually entering information into one or more systems, the ability to enter information once saves time, increases accuracy, and empowers staff to take on work that adds value.
Cloud ERP solutions like Acumatica are built to connect your business across numerous departments and locations. By combining a strong financial management backbone with a powerful CRM and industry editions built for businesses in services, manufacturing, distribution, and more, you can rest assured that your processes are efficient, your data is accurate and clean, and your people are productive.
How the Right Partner Delivers
But as great as cloud ERP is, it’s only as good as the partner who puts it in action. With so many ways to make an ERP solution work for you, expect it to align with your processes and needs.
In order to configure a solution to match your exact specifications, however, you need to work with an experienced implementation partner who gets to know you, your business, and its needs—long before they get started.
Verifying a potential implementation team’s qualifications isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the effort to properly vet final candidates — a company’s success depends on it. To learn more, read our guide Choosing the Right ERP Implementation Partner.
As a Gold Certified Acumatica Partner, we deliver a unique industry understanding, boast a strong track record, and are proven leaders in the VAR community.
Cloud 9 ERP Solutions: Your Trusted Acumatica Partner
At Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, we’re here for you long before you decide to take on an ERP project and long after you go live. We stand behind our work and have the recognition to prove it.
Get to know more about the most important things to look for out of an ERP partner, read our success stories, and contact us to request a free demo.
