For many of our clients, this is exactly the goal they are seeking to achieve. Having one single view or location they can go to to know what’s going on in every part of their business and how each departments performance impacts on the rest of the business.
Let’s take a typical business and start with marketing. Obviously, this is key to most company’s ability to reach out to new customers and keep existing customer informed and make sure they feel valued. There is clearly a cost associated with achieving your marketing goals. However, most businesses would hope that this cost is offset by the value of orders that are won due to the marketing activities. Having invested in marketing and the requisite resources to close these new deals, the next challenge is to deliver the products and/or services to fulfill the orders to then be able to raise an invoice and get paid.
All of the above is fine and probably works extremely well in most business. However, how do you know exactly how much of your marketing spend is effective; how many of your leads turn into opportunities and then orders and of these orders what is the actual cost of sale. When an order needs to be fulfilled, how much notice do the fulfillment team get and are you able to take advantage of all the cost benefits of ordering materials and products at the most advantageous times and quantities. At the end of the day, do you know exactly how much each order costs to win and deliver. Equally do you know exactly who are your best customers and can you define the rationale as to what makes them your best customer. Most companies would suggest their best customers are the ones they speak to the most, but is that true in your case or would you rather know exactly how profitable or costly a particular client is?
The challenge that many businesses have is that this information is often held in a variety of databases and whilst they have some element of overlap no one database will provide the answer to the above questions, let alone all the other business critical questions that arise on a daily basis.
Having a cumulative view of siloed or disparate databases enable companies to integrate what’s going on from end to end either at a high level or granularity. Data can be viewed in the best way to represent the results required or for the audience to digest. Viewing this data in real-time empowers businesses to react when appropriate rather than waiting until the traditional month end management reports to be produced to see that there was a problem at the beginning of the month.
At Infonote we work with clients to do exactly this, tie data together to provide a single data-set that can be analysed to provide the exact information required to make the requisite strategic decisions to develop the business and provide their customers with the level or service they demand as efficiently and profitably as possible. For more information on integration visit our software integration page.