To remain competitive in the Australian marketplace, business owners must not only implement current technology, they must innovate. Systems for streamlining operations, such as Customer Relationship (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) have grown exponentially in response to this need, but in many businesses they don’t fulfil their potential to drive business growth because they operate independently.
Today the key to growth is integration. If communication and data can flow seamlessly across the business from sales to service, finance to HR and marketing, it opens a wealth of opportunities for business owners. Both new growth opportunities and current roadblocks to efficiency are more quickly identified, whilst physical and human resources can be channeled towards innovation and exploration rather than execution and management.
Many businesses already have great products in place – they’re just not working together. Individual products such as Infusionsoft, Netsuite and Oracle are widely used for a single business process such as financial analysis, marketing communications or contact management but the data and intelligence they contain is largely isolated from the rest of the business, creating a catch-22 for business owners: invest significant staff resources to collate and combine multiple data sources, or take a silo approach which limits operational efficiency.
Microsoft Dynamics presents an opportunity for business owners to bridge this gap and begin leveraging the data already available to make faster, more substantial advances in efficiency and competitive agility. Part of the Microsoft 365 stack, this intuitive platform allows you to integrate your most important business functions in a way that’s meaningful to your business – whether that be to link your CRM and accounting to quantify customer value, or marketing and IT to measure advertising effectiveness.
As a Microsoft product, it’s readily integrated with your existing desktop Microsoft software such as Outlook and Excel, as well as cloud-based tools available in Microsoft 365 such as PowerBI, Skype and SharePoint. This familiarity helps speed up the process of integration as your staff doesn’t need to learn a completely new system, and your IT team can avoid extensive coding.
Of course, implementing any significant change to your business processes and systems is not something that happens overnight. It’s essential to obtain the advice and guidance of an expert who understands your business and can design an approach to meet your specific needs. But if you want to take your business to the next level, there are significant advantages to adopting a system like Microsoft Dynamics. These include:
- Cost effectiveness – Many individual systems for managing ERP or CRM, such as SAP and Salesforce, provide a sophisticated level of functionality in one area of business but can be quite expensive if run independently as individual vendors must support and maintain them. Microsoft Dynamics centralises this function, so you save money on IT resources.
- Powerful insights – Today more than ever, business owners must act swiftly and with certainty to gain a competitive edge. By integrating data across key areas of operation such as HR, marketing and finance, business owners can more easily analyse and respond to opportunities whilst also mitigating risk. Whether it’s determining the business cost of your new hire, or the impact of purchasing new office equipment on your productivity, greater insights mean better decision-making.
- Security – Today more than ever, no business owner can afford to risk data security. Implementing a robust system with high level support and monitoring means you don’t need to spend valuable time and staff resources applying the latest patch or update, or worrying about how to protect sensitive data.
- Flexibility – Cloud technology’s ability to give us access to information anywhere at anytime is a cornerstone of modern business. Many business owners have embraced this to some extent with products such as Xero and Google Docs, but Microsoft Dynamics takes this flexibility to a new level by not only making data available to the right people at the right time, but also making that data more meaningful. This enables key business functions like sales and marketing to work together and make smarter on the fly decisions.
Every business owner makes a multitude of decisions based on internal data. Imagine how much more powerful those decisions could be if every business area could benefit from the insights of other business functions? Platforms like Microsoft Dynamics help you to create a business environment that is fluid, responsive and productive: by integrating data across integral systems such as ERP and CRM, business owners can save time, money and staff resources and focus their attention on innovation and growth.
If change and meeting your customers’ needs is a constant, doing nothing isn’t an option. Be sure you are partnering with a company with the depth and breadth of expertise you require. Particularly one who can help you navigate end-to-end managed services, cloud, mobile and paperless office technology. GPK consultant, Ben Holian, is available for a no obligation discussion on how GPK can help you reduce operational costs, manage your IT footprint more effectively and create an exceptional experience for your customers. Contact: Phone 1300 000 475 or email info@gpkgroup.com.au for more information.
