Important Business Integration Tools
Are your company’s workflows not getting it done anymore? Is there too much cutting and pasting going on, too many employee hours spent on manual data entry tasks? Do you ever wish you could just share data between applications, instead of relying on a laborious export-then-import routine?
Business integration software is designed to solve exactly those problems. Of course, the exact nature of those problems can differ widely for companies in different industries, which is why many business integration tools look so different from each other at first glance. Fortunately, when our clients ask us for help with their business integration problems, we have the experience to make appropriate recommendations for their industry, business size, and long-term goals.
That said, we do tend to favor some tools over others, as long as they’re appropriate for the task at hand. Here’s a short list of some of our favorites:
EFI Online Print Solutions (OPS). OPS is a player in the web-to-print sector, providing users with a full range of dynamic publishing and advanced marketing capabilities. By integrating OPS into their business system infrastructure, companies can easily manage web-based ordering and payments, job submissions, and job quoting. Optional add-ons expand the power of OPS by providing support for the sort of cross-media marketing initiatives that generate leads, drive sales and maximize ROI.
FreshBooks. FreshBooks saves users time and money by bringing together invoicing, online payments, expense tracking, time tracking, and reporting capabilities. FreshBooks also integrates directly with tax software like QuickBooks, as well as a number of popular web-based apps, like PayPal and MailChimp.
HubSpot. HubSpot is the undisputed top-ranked online marketing platform for traffic and lead generation. It integrates web analytics, SEO, social media, blogging, and email under one roof, so you can manage your entire online marketing process from one place. It also integrates with over 200 apps, which are all available in its marketplace. One of HubSpot’s underrated strengths is its ability to scale up – or down – to meet the needs of businesses of any size.
Zapier. Zapier acts as a bridge between the web apps you use most, enabling you to easily move data between them and automate tedious tasks. For example, you can configure Zapier to create a new lead in SalesForce whenever you get a new entry from a Wufoo form, and it will do it automatically, every time. For businesses that live on the web, this is a welcome development, as it eliminates the need to handle these repetitive tasks manually.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course. In the course of an average month, we’ll recommend, install and configure these tools and many others, based on the needs of each specific client. If you’d like some help in figuring out which business integration tool is right for your company, give Oyova a call. We’d love to learn about your company, its challenges, and its goals.