Thinc insights
For SMEs facing increasing costs and uncertainty, business system integration helps ensure your processes are as lean as possible.
Business system integration may sound like a technical concept, but it’s a practical solution to a real challenge facing today’s businesses.
The past few years have been an era marked by unpredictability and volatile operating conditions. That shows no sign of changing, with economic reports from authorities such as the ONS in the UK yo-yoing between optimism and pessimism.
In the UK, it’s become more expensive for businesses to recruit lower-paid workers, thanks to changes in NICs and the minimum wage. At a time when your business needs everyone focused on your priorities, low-value activities such as data entry become difficult to sustain.
As our Head of Development and SI Practice Chris Haddock said in an interview with Codeless Platforms:
“The focus has changed. Customers are now trying to figure out how they can save money over the longer term by improving their systems. Understandably, there seems to be a reluctance to invest in additional head count when we can simply make the system work harder and deliver more; not necessarily reduce the head count, but certainly not increase it.”
That’s where business system integration comes in. Hours spent outputting and inputting data, correcting errors, reformatting – all of this ‘busy work’ can be eliminated by your systems talking to each other. With cloud software and more integration options than ever, it’s now easier than it’s ever been to build a connected ecosystem, so that your organisation works faster and smarter.
The key benefit of business system integration for SMEs is reducing the cost of work. By cutting the time spent on manual, labour-intensive processes, organisations can ensure that their people can spend their time on the tasks that matter.
But it is also about being equipped to deal with an unpredictable future. Businesses need ways to operate with greater flexibility, functionality and scalability. If you can get all those things right, you can really gain an advantage within the marketplace, delivering on more projects and orders, in a shorter timeframe than your competitors.
Many SMEs may already have invested in the best-in-class tools for sales, finance, operations and HR. They will operate through using a mixture of on-premise solutions, software developed in-house and external cloud products. But having the best tools doesn’t mean much if they don’t save you time or money. You need that ‘glue’ to bring everything together.
“We are also constantly encountering customers that are double-entering data in two systems,” said Chris.
“They’ll be entering information into, for example, a service system and then they’ll pull off a report and key the invoice data into the ERP system. That might take somebody a day, it could be two days. If you average that over a month, you could be talking over a week’s worth of work just rekeying invoicing data.”
Take this as a real-world example. An SME wants to benefit from several of the ‘best-in-class’ suite: HubSpot for its CRM, Sage 200 for its ERP, Shopify for its ecommerce activity. The business can’t operate to the level that it wants to achieve its growth potential without each one of these systems being of benefit to different departments, so it must make sure that the systems talk to each other, all updated by changes to data being made in real-time.
It risks creating silos if the business systems integration isn’t done correctly. If it is done correctly, however, it can lead to a more diverse set of features, and bring greater competitive advantage. It’s also far easier to swap out systems and modules as needs grow, so that the infrastructure is always keeping up with the SME’s growth ambitions.
Business systems integration has various key roles to play. It ensures real-time data sync, easier process automation and a more consistent customer experience throughout, from sales, to projects management.
We think of it as the glue because it ties a collection of systems together, and a risk of no integration can mean manual rekeying of and disconnected data, project delays and more room for human error. It can be a rather complex project, if it’s the first time it’s been considered – but that’s where speaking with the experts can help.
At Thinc, through our partnership with Codeless Platforms, we can use our ERP and cloud expertise, coupled with BPA Platform, to provide a key enabler of smart, scalable business system integration.
BPA Platform is Codeless Platform’s low-code solution for automation and integration. It can be deployed quickly in a cloud, on premise or hybrid environment.
It’s compatible with core ERP systems, such as Sage 200, Sage Intacct and SAP Business One, while also applicable with SQLs, APIs and a whole host of cloud applications. It’s simple enough to use that you don’t need a custom developer every time for every integration, with simple drag and drop functionality for mapping out integrations.
As an SME grows, BPA Platform allows your IT infrastructure to grow with it, making it easier to change, scale or add new systems without starting completely from scratch. It’s a key part of our arsenal at Thinc, used by our system integration and development specialists to streamline the number of processes our clients require.
Thinc uses BPA Platform to offer SMEs with a bespoke service that’s highly optimised to meet the needs of each business. We pride ourselves on our deep knowledge and understanding of ERP tools such as Sage 200, SAP Business One and Sage Intacct, managed services and how business system integration supports to glue it all together, and bring industry expertise across a whole host of sectors such as construction, manufacturing, warehousing and distribution and chemicals.
At Thinc, we’ve helped business across industries connect their systems to eliminate manual processes and improve accuracy.
One example of this is when customers are using an existing ERP, such as Sage 200, but they needed a faster way to manage ecommerce orders. By integrating Sage 200 with leading eCommerce software such as Shopify, a customer can expect to manage orders with more ease through order imports, real-time stock updates and instant customer notifications – dramatically reducing admin time and order errors.
Another customer could be using a different ERP – SAP Business One. They may be looking to streamline their logistics, by integrating their ERP with their choice courier service. In using BPA Platform to integrate the two, things like shipment bookings, label generation and other parts of the supply chain can be automated to save hours every week and improve customer satisfaction.
Another common integration is ERP to CRM. Popular CRM systems like HubSpot or Salesforce can be linked, so the entire customer experience is tracked. Sales and finance are always aligned in their customer data, billing status and contract details – it’s all dictated by real-time data, removing duplications and confusions, while freeing up that resource that would’ve otherwise been spent pulling data from different systems.
Why integrate now, and what does the future look like?
As we’ve covered, technology is always changing. More and more tools being available on the cloud means there’s more need for integration across the board. What’s more, hybrid and remote work demands connected systems for the business to run as efficiently as possible, while AI and automation depends on unified data.
For SMEs looking to get their infrastructure ready for the future, and with more applications now having API available, it’s become easier than ever.
“More and more applications have an API available these days and so there is greater demand for integration. We therefore wanted a tool that could provide that.” Chris Haddock, Head of Development and SI Practice
As your business grows, so should your software landscape. It’s no longer about having one central software to host everything required, you can now benefit from all of the best-in-class systems of choice, integrated together, to build a flexible and future-ready infrastructure for growth.
At Thinc, we combine our deep ERP expertise with the power of the BPA Platform to help you to connect all of your systems, thus automating processes and unlock greater value from your technology. Whether you’re looking to eliminate manual tasks or unify your data, we’re here to help you make it happen – seamlessly and strategically.
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