One integrated system vs multiple applications

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THE
GREAT DEBATE:One Integrated System vs. Multiple Applications

Copyright © 2017, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
THE GREAT DEBATE
One Integrated System vs. Multiple Applications
As fast-growing companies achieve greater
market penetration, gain more customers
and their organization grows, they often run
in to a wall where internal processes struggle
to keep up with continued demand. The
key challenge to supporting that growth is
laying the groundwork to scale the business
effectively and efficiently while maintaining
customer service and support.
When starting out, most companies solve
problems in the quickest, cheapest ways
possible, which over time, leads them
toward one of the biggest pitfalls for
growing organizations—using multiple
standalone business applications for varying
departmental functions in an ad hoc manner.
As the business and its complexity grow,
these disparate systems create operational
inefficiencies that can be detrimental to
the bottom line, damage the customer
experience, and impede the company’s ability
to reach its full potential.
This white paper covers the types of
inefficiencies caused by running disparate
business solutions and systems for different
departments and how a software platform
that unifies critical business processes helps
companies grow more rapidly and profitably.
This paper reviews numerous case studies
of companies that switched from disparate
software systems to an integrated software
suite and also covers analysis by independent
industry expert, Nucleus Research, of
customers’ ROI from using an integrated
software suite.
Grab a seat and enjoy.
Read Time: 10 minutes

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Real-Time
Visibility and a
Unified Customer
View
Page 8
Process Efficiency
Across the
Organization
Page 6
Significant IT Time
and Cost Savings
Page 9
Inefficiencies
of a Standalone
System
Architecture
Page 4
Accelerated
Growth and
Expansion
Page 10
Conclusion
Page 11
The Great
Debate: One
Integrated System
vs. Multiple
Applications
Page 2
Comparing
the Suite to
a Standalone
System
Page 5

Inefficiencies of a Standalone
System Architecture
Businesses that select their systems over time
can find themselves with a poorly planned
architecture that handles short-term tactical
needs sub-optimally while holding the company
back from scaling efficiently over the long term.
These inefficiencies can become so severe
that they cripple growth. There are four primary
issues that hinder growth when running a
business on multiple disparate systems.
Non-Value Added Activities: If your employees
are bogged down navigating inefficient and
disjointed processes, it increases errors and
takes time away from their more important
core duties. Important processes such
as order processing, invoicing, expense
approvals and fulfillment, can take a lot
longer to get completed if too much manual
effort is required and are often erroneous.
For instance, employees may be spending
hours re-entering order information into
the accounting and invoicing system, while
other employees pull that same information
from the CRM system for order fulfillment
processes and to calculate sales commissions.
If any orders are canceled in the meantime,
employees have to sift through mounds of
data to reconcile this information again. Such
labor-intensive and manual tasks steal away
time that could be otherwise spent on helping
the company grow and innovate.
Lack of Real-time Visibility: When software
systems are not integrated, you have multiple
overlapping databases and cannot easily
get a view of business performance in a
Sign supplier, Advantage Sign Supply,
was having trouble keeping up with order
volumes and managing inventory and
wanted to improve profitability while growing
their customer base. After deploying
NetSuite, a completely integrated cloud
business system, they were able to cut order
processing time by 66%, decrease inventory
on hand by $500,000, automate electronic
invoicing saving $1,000 a month and launch
an ecommerce sales channel that now
accounts for 11% of revenue.
timely fashion. Reports showing performance
across finance, sales, marketing, service
and fulfillment departments are crucial to
giving an integrated view of a company’s
operations. Most companies simply give
up on acquiring this information on a regular
basis because of the amount of time it takes to
source, extract and analyze this data. For those
that do, countless hours are wasted trying
to tie unrelated, errorprone and out-of-date
information together. Consequently, businesses
end up making critical decisions slowly based
on inaccurate information, or they make hasty
and risky decisions off of gut instinct.
Integration Complexity and Cost: With so
many disparate applications, IT wastes an
enormous amount of time and money on
integrating, maintaining, upgrading, and
acquiring new versions of these applications.
Once new versions are purchased, even

more integration and maintenance needs to
be performed for all the different versions
of software to work together. Consequently,
valuable IT time that could be used to make
the business more productive is wasted, while
maintenance costs skyrocket.
With this in mind, its not a
surprise that the leading analyst
firm, Gartner, reports that 91%
of IT staff time is spent on
software maintenance rather
than on innovation.
Increased Customer Churn: Customer
acquisition and revenue growth are key
pillars to a company’s continued success.
With fierce competition, it is essential that a
company provides an exceptional customer
experience or risk having customers take
their business elsewhere. When customers
are unable to quickly get order status
information, can’t get issues resolved easily,
have poor product fulfillment experiences
and customer satisfaction is damaged, the
likelihood of repurchase decreased and the
risk of negative word-of-mouth increased.
An integrated software system ensures
that customers have the right information
and customer experience they demand by
providing customers with a real-time self-
service portal and by providing customer
facing employees instantaneous access to
all the customer interaction and transaction
information they need to service and sell.
Customers of Australian wine retailer,
WineMarket, used to wait an average of 45
seconds before getting their call answered
with many calls requiring a call back. With
NetSuite, they were able to reduce wait
times to 11 seconds, achieve a 95% first-
call resolution rate and improve overall
customer satisfaction results.
Comparing the Suite to a
Standalone System
When companies first start growing, they
have several options to implement the front-
and back-office systems needed. From
accounting to CRM to order management and
beyond, applications can be implemented in
a piecemeal, staged process or in a process
that takes into account how these various
systems will interact with each other and what
level of integration they require.
As company and revenue growth accelerates,
it becomes increasingly essential to
integrate business software applications
and standardize across a single database
and business process. The advantages of
designing software systems in this manner
tremendously improves business productivity,
visibility across the organization and IT cost
savings. Let us examine some of the key areas
in which fast-growing companies can benefit
from implementing a software suite.

Process Efficiency Across the Organization
The key to avoiding manual, duplicative work
is to ensure that your core business processes
are seamlessly integrated from the front-
office to the back-office. Automating such
processes enables you to minimize employee
time spent on activities that would otherwise
be required to manage these processes, and
redeploy staff to higher-value activities to help
the business innovate and grow. Quantifiable
benefits can be realized in critical processes
such as quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay,
accounts payable, and payroll, expense and
incentive management.
Quote-to-Cash: When a company converts
a prospect into a customer, they often do so
by re-entering the same customer data from
the CRM system into the order management
system and then into the accounting system.
Without front-to-back-office integration,
valuable time is wasted with manual data entry
paper-based processes and back and forth
communications regarding order status and
monthly revenue recognition and customer
experience suffers because of these delays.
Once an order has been placed into the order
Monobind, a medical device manufacturer,
was able to cut its order fulfillment times
by 50% after deploying NetSuite and its
production planning time from days to hours.
management system, companies need to
ensure that customers provide payment in
time and that the time taken to fulfill an order
doesn’t get to a point where it results in order
cancellations or customer dissatisfaction.
Procure-to-Pay: To fuel growth, businesses
need to purchase equipment or raw materials.
The procure-to-pay process that starts with
acquiring raw materials and culminates with
paying stakeholders, is a complicated one that
involves several touch points within purchasing,
receiving and accounts payables functions.
Each of these functions deal with disparate
software that needs to work together to enable
the purchasing of equipment or raw materials,
and then eventually pay the vendors providing
these deliverables.
“Before, we had to physically bring a hard copy of a new order to
production and channel to each department. Now new orders are
entered and we all have instant visibility. NetSuite provides the critical
tool to see our current sales demand, direct the orders through our
seven-step assembly process and ensure that they go out the door
on time to give our customers the best delivery performance possible
meeting our quality and performance objectives.” — Monobind

An integrated suite ensures that the procure-
to-pay process is streamlined. It automates
the entire process and eliminates manual
errors by employees. When employees can
track the status of purchase requisitions and
orders through self-service functionality that
eliminates paper-based forms and errors, it
frees up your staff for higher-value activities,
while simultaneously trimming the bottom line.
A further benefit of an integrated suite
is ensuring that purchase orders are
automatically generated once reorder points
have been reached for certain goods or
raw materials. This means that instead of
having to pull staff off projects to look up
previously completed purchase orders and
order quantities, and to generate a new
purchase order, the purchase orders are now
automatically generated.
An independent analysis by
industry experts, Nucleus
Research, of customers using
NetSuite found that they reported
inventory carrying cost.
Accounts Payable: Once purchase orders
have been generated, vendors that provide
goods or services to the company need to
get paid. The finance staff will then need to
confirm whether the services or goods were
delivered as promised and only then authorize
accounts payable to release payment to the
vendor. All these activities consume valuable
cycles that employees could instead spend on
the core business. An integrated system like
NetSuite will ensure payments are made on a
timely basis and the process is automated to a
great extent.
Payroll, Expense and Incentive Management:
As a company grows, so does the number
of employees. Operating disparate software
systems for payroll, expense management
and incentive compensation can result
in a spreadsheet nightmare. Calculating
parameters such as salary, withholdings,
deductions, and sick and vacation day
accruals can consume several hours each
week and consist of manual, error-prone
processes executed primarily on these
spreadsheets or duplicated across disparate
software applications.
“NetSuite's Payroll makes it easy. Other companies will try and sell
you something that doesn’t connect with your system and requires
separate servers, but with NetSuite, accounting and CRM are tied
together. Competitors can’t do that. Now I don’t worry about it,
software or updates and to me, that’s priceless!” — I.D. Me Promotions

A closely related aspect of payroll is incentive
compensation for the sales force. Sales
operations personnel have to spend countless
hours on sales incentive plan construction, as
well as research, and resolve sales disputes
on how much commission is due. A software
suite that includes incentive compensation
allows sales operations and finance
employees to save time by automatically
calculating commissions based on sales
orders processed, taking into account
sophisticated sales commission rules based
on quotas, sales, quantity and profitability.
It integrates the incentive compensation
system with payroll and accounting systems to
streamline payment processing.
When it comes to expense management,
a suite allows self-service features to be
embedded so that employees can enter
expense reports and have them routed
automatically to the appropriate managers,
with all approvals being instantly captured in
payroll and accounting.
Real-Time Visibility and a Unified
Customer View
Getting an accurate view of a company’s
operations can be a challenge if there are
multiple disconnected business systems. Data
is fragmented and scattered across disparate
systems and spreadsheets, often out-of-date,
error-prone and hard to maintain. Efforts to tie
together multiple sources of data can be time-
consuming and incomplete. Traditional add-on
analytics tools for these disparate applications
are expensive to purchase and implement,
and often lack the ease of use necessary to
make them pervasive.
Financial reporting or revenue recognition can
drag on for weeks as employees have to extract
and sift through data from multiple divisions,
geographies, subsidiaries and business units,
each with its own set of order management,
revenue and accounting packages.
Mindwave Research, a professional
services company, deployed NetSuite
and reduced their time to perform cash
flow analysis by 18 hours per week, and
the time for monthly financial closings by
eight hours per month. They also gained
the ability to forecast cash flow up to six
months in advance and saved $50,000
yearly over extra staffing that would be
required without NetSuite.
“I can be in a café in Italy and use my iPhone to see how sales are
going, what shipments are on the water, which POS have been
paid—and then I can go back to the trade show and talk about new
composites for bicycle frames. NetSuite is easy to use, but it also can
take us to a $100 million company without missing a beat.” — Niner Bikes

So how does a software suite provide the key
business intelligence components needed
in order to have a holistic detailed view of
your business operations? Because all critical
functions and processes are in one central
database, it can instantly deliver personalized
insights of the company’s performance
tailored to each user’s need—be it CFO,
controller, CEO, sales manager, marketing
manager or inventory manager. Because all
reports and dashboards extract data from a
single, centralized data repository, the multiple
versions of the truth that your employees
currently obtain from disparate systems and
spreadsheets are eliminated.
Continued business growth often requires
that companies maintain and enhance
customer relationships. This is particularly
challenging as a company employs more and
more people, often in different departments,
geographies and divisions using different
processes and systems. By arming sales,
service, operations and other customer
facing staff with real-time access to all critical
customer information, the team can more
quickly and accurately handle the customer’s
requests. This complete view of each
customer interaction and transaction history is
also powerful for maximizing upsell,
“With NetSuite, all of our data is 100% accurate, presented in real-time
and available at the click of a button. It’s made a huge difference to
the way we work.” — Arboricultural Association
cross-sell and renewal revenue and can be
used to identify customer trends and patterns
for strategic planning and marketing efforts.
Significant IT Time and Cost Savings
Companies with disparate software systems
have to contend with several types of
applications ranging from accounting to
financial planning, order management, CRM,
ecommerce and business intelligence tools.
Multiple applications consume valuable IT
time spent planning, deploying, managing,
integrating, maintaining and upgrading
various systems. Capital-intensive hardware
infrastructure and software licenses, combined
with expensive, time-consuming upgrades,
drive up expenses and can get out of control
the faster a company grows.
Nucleus Research found
software companies moving
from on-premise applications to
NetSuite eliminated an average
of $23,000 in software license
maintenance costs per year. IT
staff savings for those companies
ranged from 50% to 65% of total
IT time.

In fact, as business systems age, functionality
starts diminishing, but the disruption and
expense of upgrading to the latest version
makes it unfeasible to do so.
In a software suite, IT no longer has to
procure, install and maintain multiple systems
and the various integrations between them.
Operational costs are significantly reduced
while IT time can instead be spent on growing
the business and improving the company’s
business operations.
Accelerated Growth and Expansion
Expansion to new geographies, markets,
product lines and additional sales channels
can be accomplished faster with an integrated
system because of unified order and
accounting management processes and data.
“NetSuite gives us a single view of the customer, rather than having
customer data all over the place. We have strengthened customer
support and customer relations, and we’ve been able to speed up
order processing while improving system availability at the same
time.” — Lightspeed Technologies
Schaeffer Manufacturing, a producer of
motor oils, had a real dilemma on its hands.
The company’s growth to $100 million in
sales outpaced its 25-year-old fragmented
AS/400-based proprietary system. Its larger
customers were demanding automated
order and payment methods, and Schaeffer
was faced with buying an expensive ERP
system or a collection of applications they
would have to integrate. By choosing
NetSuite’s unified business management
system, Schaeffer saved $100,000 annually
in programming costs alone.
Toy retailer, Outback Toys, deployed
NetSuite and experienced a 33%
growth in orders while simultaneously
saving $25,000 per year on web store
management staff, and without having to
increase warehouse staff.

Conclusion
Today, companies in virtually every industry
are using sophisticated business software
to manage operations but many are still
struggling to keep up with their growth
and manage costs effectively because of a
hairball of disparate software applications.
This hairball is causing process bottlenecks
and employee productivity issues. Integrated
cloud business management software suites
such as NetSuite are transforming companies
and enabling them to transcend growing
pains that previously were holding them back
from taking their business to the next level of
profitable growth.
“We were becoming a big company, but we couldn’t afford a big,
integrated ERP system. With NetSuite, our competitive advantage is
strengthened.” — Schaeffer Manufacturing

One integrated system vs multiple applications

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