Integrating systems for every department is something that every business should aim to do. This is because there are a number of benefits that will be realized if we have multiple systems functioning as one. When you have only one system working for each and every department with them being independent from each other, there are a number of challenges that you are bound to face. This is especially the case if your business is a growing at a high rate. If you do not want your business growth rate to be affected, then integrating your department systems would be the solution.

What is an integrated business system?

Integrating your business systems, as can be denoted from the name, is a process that involves synchronizing the different processes of an organization. Example of an integrated business system would be where the Accounting department, Human resource Department and Payroll department are integrated such that any of the departments can get information from the other with ease.

With an integrated business system linking all the departments of the business, all the departments would be working under one system. This factor helps to bring in coordination and enables easy retrieval of information from every department.

Benefits of integrating your business systems

The most obvious benefit that you will get after integrating your business systems is improved performance of your business. You will be able to get information about department operations at a very short time. This will help to make informed decisions that will be timely to avoid any future challenges.

The other benefit of integrating your business system is that employees will be able to save on time. This is especially the case when they want to extract data that they will use to run the business operations. This leaves ore time to handle other productive things.

Integrated systems also help to minimize human errors that are mostly experienced when one manually gets information from one department to use it in another department. It will also be easy to consolidate the information from all the departments, which is useful when the business wants to prepare audit reports.

Integrated systems will also increase the employee efficiency levels. This is because manually getting data or information from another department may be a daunting task. However, with one synced system where data can be easily retrieved, the employees will be able to work faster and save time to carry out other tasks.

An integrated business system also helps to save on costs. Having multiple systems and maintaining them is a very big challenge in terms of cost. One should hence have one system that will be cheap to purchase at inception and will be cheap to maintain.

Consequences of not having an integrated business system or multiple online solution for a unique business

One of the effects of not having an integrated system for your departments is that you will lose a lot of time. This is because the information is stored in different databases and thus looking for it may be a very big challenge. Some files may even be wrongly named leading to one retrieving the wrong information that will affect the business negatively. Losing time is very bad for a business as the employees may fail to deliver as much as they are expected to.

With a system for each department, one is also bound to make errors when retrieving information. Making errors may be very devastating for any business. This is because wrong decisions will be made that will negatively affect the business. With a single system however, one will be able to retrieve accurate data, which will help the business to grow. Another error that may occur with different systems is double data entry. This may be done where different departments enter the same data twice, which may also cause confusion during retrieval. It can however be avoided by having a single system.

It is also hard to evaluate your customer behavior using different systems. This is because the information that is gained may not be sequential and you may not get an accurate analysis of how your customers are responding to your product and services. Having the wrong information about your customers may lead to the business making wrong decisions, which may lead to weak business-customer relationships. With a single system however, such errors are avoided and one will be able to monitor their customers better to establish how they can improve their service delivery.

Another negative effect of not synchronizing the systems is that one will incur many costs as they try to maintain the different systems. This factor is bound to lead to reduced income for a business. It is also very expensive to purchase different systems. However, purchasing one system with one database to store all the information from different departments is very cheap and a system that is very cheap to maintain.

A system that is not integrated will lead to the lack of employee productivity as well as reduced business performance. This is a major side effect as it may lead to a redundant business that will suffer losses in the end. When a lot of time is wasted as people try to retrieve information, the employees may end up not handling some very important tasks.

Conclusion

Integration of business systems can be done in a number of ways. Integrating systems will make sure that you have a single system that will ensure that all your information will be integrated in one place. This is to ensure that the information can be easily retrieved when the need arises. Many negative effects are caused by a business adopting different systems for every department. These negative effects can cause major losses for a business and even cause business failure due to the general lack of productivity.