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Small and middle-market companies are the lifeblood of the economy — in all regions of the world. But many of these companies today feel the need for a transfusion — the operational boost that can move them to a customer-focused business with the ability to grow even larger. These small and mid-sized businesses (called SMBs) have many of the same business requirements as large corporations; they may be smaller or employ fewer people, but they can have equally complex business processes.
Big businesses moved from home-grown legacy systems to a plethora of stand-alone applications (sometimes referred to in the past as “best of breed”), but by the end of the 1990’s these big guys had consolidated on running the majority of their core business on one integrated platform, such as SAP’s R/3, PeopleSoft, or Oracle applications. These integrated business applications proved invaluable in improved productivity and better business management, but at the time, they were also expensive, complex, difficult to implement, manage and support, with protracted deployments (sometimes years) that delayed a recognizable return on investment. For these reasons, small and mid-sized businesses avoided these large ERP suites like the proverbial plague; at the time, they were just too risky for a small business to undertake. Despite repeated efforts from the big ERP vendors to capture the mid-market businesses, the SMBs simply weren’t biting.
Unlike the Fortune 1000, today’s SMBs are more likely to have a hodge-podge of software products in use in their business. These applications typically share common characteristics: the financial packages, usually the first procured, run on a standalone PC, and are the first to cause problems, as they cannot accommodate growth in transactions, cannot scale to accommodate more users, and have severe database limitations. The second software package a small business buys is usually tied to the nature of the business itself — an application suitable to the vertical industry in which the business plays. And these two applications don’t “talk” to each other. Additional applications — inventory or warehouse management, customer relationship management (CRM), T&E management, HR, etc., may be added — leaving the small business with a disconnected slew of applications — and what’s worse — the problems of manually entering and re-entering data across these multiple products. The ramifications include lost productivity in work hours spent re-entering data manually and attempting to consolidate data from the disparate systems; extremely high error rates, as manually entered data is highly prone to mistakes; lack of visibility to the information necessary to make decisions; and outgrown applications that cannot scale to allow the business to grow. The SMB is trapped by the limits of the very technology that was intended to help the company grow and thrive.
And unlike large companies, small and mid-sized businesses face the realities of smaller budgets, fewer IT resources, and zero tolerance for risk. They cannot withstand the long implementation timeframes or the cost of the ERP solutions that are the mainstay of large corporations.
The Advantages of the Integrated Suite for SMBs
Addressing the plethora of disconnected applications is the first step a small or mid-sized company can take to gain better control of its business operations and increase the efficiency of those operations. A single integrated suite of software — often referred to as an ERP or enterprise resource planning solution — provides significant advantages to the business, accommodating the breadth of the company’s business processes, while providing the flexibility for even small companies to tailor the suites to meet their specific business needs.1
Why do I care if my applications are integrated?
Today’s technology solutions for the middle market and smaller businesses have distinct advantages over their predecessors — both the large ERP products that were installed in very big company and the standalone applications that were traditionally installed in the SMB. New advances in technology bring mid-sized companies the benefits of a single business management suite without the cost, complexity, and rigidity of traditional software applications.
So let’s look at these benefits. What does an integrated suite of business applications allow your business to achieve that a collection of stand-alone applications cannot?
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