The Digitalization Jigsaw Puzzle: Saving a Spot for Integration
When it comes to running a business, it takes a village. And by village, we really mean more of a city – an often hectic, ever-growing population of systems that must work in tandem to support operations day and night, minute after minute. And like a city, things can quickly fall into disrepair when these systems fail to work collaboratively. What happens, for example, when these organizations choose a point-solution for project time tracking that doesn’t play nice with their existing patchwork infrastructure? They run into challenges that make critical processes dependent on inconsistent, error-prone project and time data – resulting in delays, reactive measures, and inflexible, non-scalable ecosystems.
With an ongoing pandemic and unsteady economy redefining life as we know it, it’s more important than ever for businesses to ensure that they have the right tools to share data – especially time data, which feeds into every process – consistently across payroll, HRMS, CRM, ERP, and other systems. The key is in digitalization initiatives that can seamlessly support the exchange of data and other integrative capabilities. While many business leaders tend to steer clear of what they anticipate to be an expensive, drawn-out change management nightmare, not all digital transformations are created equal. When modernization approaches designed to plug and play are cloud-enabled, mobile-ready, and platform-based, they can support key costing, billing, and pay processes across an organization by helping to consolidate metrics without disrupting operations or incurring astronomical costs. And each process uniquely benefits from the digital upgrade:
Payroll and HR
Aligning employee time with pay should be an obvious move, but when systems can’t talk, avoiding manual intervention, duplication of data, and administrative overhead proves exceedingly difficult. Effective integration capabilities will help businesses leverage the existing user data in their HR system for tracking time and attendance, and streamline the time and labor data for payroll purposes. A platform approach simplifies the implementation process and brings businesses enhanced payroll accuracy and fast time-to-value.
Costing, Billing, and Accounting
Maintaining organized cost and revenue management and hassle-free client billing isn’t always a walk in the park, but costing, billing, invoicing, and expenses can’t take a break. Whether it’s full-time employees, consultants, contractors, or otherwise, enabling the flow of project time tracking data to accounting systems ensures accurate project costing and timely processing of all contractor, vendor payments, and client billing. Unifying costing and accounting processes across a common platform can provide business leaders and managers with the real-time visibility into billed hours and approvals needed to set priorities and make informed decisions to manage costs, increase billing and account how every minute is converted to dollars moving forward.
CRM and ERP
For many organizations, the handoff of a newly closed deal from sales to the services delivery team can be more stressful than anything else; this happens simply because the delivery team lacks visibility into the sales pipeline. Delivery and sales must be able to coordinate on timelines, costs, initial bids, and more for a satisfactory final product, but it’s impossible to forecast or plan for a project no one knows exists. As a result the delivery team can never get a head start, and this can damage a business’s credibility among clients and reduce overall confidence in their work. By enabling the CRM, project tracking, and billing systems to interact, businesses can streamline the exchange between teams and get an immediate boost in more effective communication, optimized resource planning, and accurate cost estimates.
In these unprecedented times, creating the conditions for a profitable business relies on a flexible, centralized solution with built-in plug and play as an integral feature. Acknowledging the necessity of incorporating digital innovation into an otherwise siloed ecosystem is an important first step in making your processes work for you. With modernization enabling seamless integration, anything is possible.
Contact us for a conversation around how Replicon can help with your digital transformation:
