Why All of Your Systems Should Be Integrated?
It is not unusual to find businesses having multiple separate systems. It usually happens over time. At first, the owner may find out that he needs a tool to manage his receivables more efficiently, so he put up an account receivable system. It may or may not already include the invoicing modules. Then later on, as the business grows bigger, the inventory might become too much to handle manually, and demands that an inventory system be incorporated in the process. Then, there comes the procurement and payable system, the accounting system, payroll system, and so on.
The provider of those systems may be different vendors. Or some may have been provided through programmers hired 'in-house' by the company for the purpose of developing a system. It could also be one of those systems that can be downloaded from the Internet for free. Each may have serve their own purpose effectively. However, when taken as a whole, this could present some problems. One of the potential deficiency is consistency of data.
Inconsistencies can be introduced because the information encoded in one system does not align with the one encoded in the other. For example, a sales invoice is encoded in the account receivable system, with the items and the prices and discounts included. However, the same items were not encoded in the inventory system. So when the time comes to produce a report to extract how many items were sold for a certain period of time, the report could actually be generated two different ways - one from each system. When the report come out with different figures, the reliability of the systems will take a hit - you would not know which report to believe, or that if either one of them could be relied unto at all.
The preceding scenario actually presents another problem - there is a redundancy of work. The personel have to encode the same information twice. It is a waste of time and money. The ideal situation is that the information should only be encoded once. For instance, when a personel encoded the items in the sales order module, it should not need to be re-encoded in the delivery receipt/ invoicing module. Instead, the previously encoded information should just be referenced by the next module.
As the business grows more complex, the system must be able to keep pace with it. Having multiple systems makes changes, whether it is upgrading or adjusting the business process, more difficult to implement. Yes it is more costly, more expensive in the long run. It is actually more difficult to even maintain. It is a problem that needs to be solved. But it is not hopeless. At least you already have systems. It only needs to be streamlined to make it more efficient and effective. We have seen it, many times already actually. We have "been there, done that".