Improving Efficiency with Business Integration Software
One of the key benefits of business system integration is the amount of time it can save your employees. That’s because the integration process naturally streamlines workflows and processes by removing redundant or unnecessary steps, or by dramatically reducing the time it takes to perform certain tasks.
Integrating your business systems can save time in any number of ways, depending on your industry, company size, and several other variables. But here are four ways that business integration software can save your business time – and therefore money – that you may not have thought of yet:
1. Online payment reconciliation. Are your people still manually exporting your online payment information into a spreadsheet, cleaning, and re-formatting the data, and then manually importing it into your accounting software? As more and more commerce moves to the web, how your online payments figure into your workflows will only loom larger and larger. By integrating your online payment system and your accounting software, you can automate that process, which in turn has two major advantages: it frees up your employees’ time for more value-added tasks, and it drastically reduces the chances for typos and cut-and-paste failures to wreak havoc with your records.
2. Shipping integration. When a customer places an order, they don’t want to wait for it. By integrating your shipping system into your business software ecosystem, you’ll speed up the order processing stage and improve customer satisfaction, thus boosting the chances that they’ll buy from you again.
3. Business Intelligence integration. Working with data can be a time-intensive process under the best circumstances. True, much of the actual work involved in data-driven projects occurs in the “data cleaning” phase, which happens before any actual analytics are done. But on the other end of the process, you’ve still got to get those results out of your BI tools and into a format that you can share as well as integrate with other components in your workflow. Integrating your BI tools makes data extraction and report generation much faster, saving your well-paid number-crunchers valuable time.
4. Collaboration. If your company typically works on projects that are spread across multiple locations, you probably know the frustration of waiting for the collaborative process to unfold. Emails, attachments, databases that are slow to update – all of these old-fashioned methods eat up time and add costs to your projects. By integrating your systems, you can enjoy the real-time collaboration between different stakeholders on a project – no matter where they are. This cuts out all the waiting around in between tasks and project milestones, speeding things along and lowering your costs.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course. There are almost certainly many other ways that business integration software can save your company time and money. If you’d like to learn more, give Oyova a call. We’d be happy to explain how business integration software fits into your company’s specific set of workflows and practices, and how it can change the way you do business – for the better. Call us today
