In 2023, Salesforce put out an article headline that confirmed a major problem for those of us in the tech consultancy business.

“Failing to complete digital transformation initiatives costs organizations an estimated $9.5 million annually

“A third of organizations plan to invest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to drive efficient growth

“Demand for automation surges across non-technical teams such as HR, marketing, and product development.” – Salesforce

Here’s a look at the power of solid integration of your systems.

What’s missing in digital systems?

Many companies are paying good money for state-of-the-art systems. They get programs that will solve all their problems… only to find that there are still problems.

If your ERP is not communicating with your warehouse management system and neither is tied to your CRM, there’s a lot of data missing. 

Example: Outdoor Equipment Manufacturer

Imagine this scenario that we often see in Colorado: Your ERP at your outdoor equipment manufacturing company is handling your internal systems, but it’s not communicating in real-time with your warehouse inventory management system. That’s not communicating with your CRM. 

Your factory is making products. It’s going to the warehouse, but since those two systems aren’t communicating in real-time, the ERP has no way of knowing that it needs to tell you to slow a line because the warehouse is overstocked on an item. Or that the stick at the warehouse is low, so you should push online faster. 

Connected Enterprise Apps

When a customer orders from you, the order goes through. The CRM has a record of what’s sold, but the ERP won’t find out until, eventually, stock numbers are updated from the warehouse. 

If all of this is linked properly, the customer will place an order, the warehouse system will pull an item out of inventory, and the ERP will know that you need to make more of that item because it’s selling. 

According to the Salesforce survey, most firms have over 1,000 apps working throughout the company, but no one is connecting them to take full advantage of the data. 

If it’s all connected, the marketing department will be alerted that item X is selling well suddenly because someone put up a TikTok video. Marketing then starts a promotion based on the video and the ERP will ramp up production and prepare the warehouse for a rush on that item.

An ERP, like NetSuite, can be an amazing tool, but it needs all the data it can get. Without a well-connected ecosystem of apps, it’s blind. 

The key is to make sure you connect every app to everything else so you can have all your data in one place.