Your business is ready to move from Excel to something more advanced. It’s time to manage inventory, track potential hires and manage leads with a system that’ll (hopefully) help your business run faster. What system do you pick to support your business? Here are general pros and cons for using a large-scale business operations system.
Everything in one place
If you use a fully featured operations management platform like Zoho, Salesforce, Hubspot or SAP, your business can realize a lot of benefits. The systems are readily available at low prices. Their marketing and CRM systems talk with their bookkeeping systems and business analytics. Having everything in one place can make it easier for your staff to onboard and operate.
Not everything in one place
But when you use QuickBooks, you get accounting systems, payroll, payment acceptance, but there’s no CRM integrated. If you use Salesforce, you’re going to miss some HR components that Zoho can provide. Or if you have a complex distribution pipeline, you might choose SAP and find out you’re missing the top tier CRM features from Salesforce. Nothing’s stopping you from using each of these systems for their strengths, but that’s also more costly financially and harder for humans to keep track of what needs to be handled where. At some point, you’re back where you started, instead of having 20 Excel spreadsheets to manage, you’ve got 5 “all inclusive” systems.
Platform determines your processes
By this stage in your business, you’ve likely developed standard operating procedures for many different pieces of your business. That’s great, and a big step towards being more scalable. When you use a pre-built system, you are choosing to have the large software vendor determine how your processes are run. If your processes fit into their mold of how their software behaves, then you’re golden. Otherwise, you have the choice of changing your processes and retraining your people or finding another platform that better fits what you’re used to. Alternatively, you could pay for some custom work be done with the platforms to help them fit your processes.
Custom software = you in charge of your processes
The more costly option is building systems around your existing processes in a way that adds proper access controls, makes things faster and makes the processes more reliable. You can find a custom software vendor that will help build the perfect system for you. Or a custom integration between two systems could be built to bridge the gap in one of your processes.
There are many factors to consider when choosing “build or buy”. A careful consideration of the available options should be made before choosing the system for your business.
In our experience, there isn’t a magic bullet. We’ve found good business success when building small pieces that help the bigger software systems align with your business processes. A good blend of build and buy. In other cases, it makes sense to go with the extremes of building a custom system or completely aligning with an operations platform. Drop us a line and let us know what you’re considering as you are scaling your business processes.
