A common complaint from integrators is having too many different pieces of software that don’t talk to one another.
“This is not uncommon, because the industry has grown up this way,” according to David McNutt. “There was never a really good piece of software to cover everything. So we use every other good piece of software, to do a number of different functions inside the company. Unfortunately, most of them don’t talk to each other.”
“It is not that the pieces of software are bad, they just don’t connect to the other ones. The problem this creates, is that you can’t get good information about what’s going on in the company across different functions of the business. So there is just Excel hell going on all over the place trying to marry information together and figure out what’s going on.”
New software systems are expensive, but what do you do if it costs you too much to keep using the software you’ve got?
It is not unusual for two or three people to retype the same information, just because pieces of software don’t talk to one another. “This is a real productivity drain,” reports McNutt. “The way to think about it, is even if it takes somebody five or ten minutes to do something, and it takes somebody else five or ten minutes to do something, and it takes three or four of those people five or ten minutes to do something, and you multiply that by the number of customers and number of times that we’re paying for them, it truly is thousands of dollars of wasted time.”
When you consider investing in a new piece of software, you need to do a cost benefit analysis.
“You really do have to do a cost analysis,” says McNutt. “We were doing this with a company not too long ago and we found that the CFO was actually spending about a day and a half a week making Excel spreadsheets. They were the most beautiful I’ve seen on the planet. They were really good, and the information was great, but it cost them so much money for him to be doing that. So, you could now see how it might make sense to invest in something that pulled all of that information together.”
“When it is time for you to do a cost benefit analysis, we can help you do that,” says McNutt. “We have several tools to help you, and this is the best place to start.”
Watch the full video below.
For more information, read the companion article, Assessing the Value of Investing in ERP Software, where David McNutt discusses Navigate’s Value Assessment tool. Navigate developed this tool to help integrators make informed decisions about investing in ERP software. You can download this tool on the Resources page of the Navigate website.
