Streamlining Siloed Systems to Optimize Business Operations 

Introduction

Small and medium businesses today have systems that were put in place based on the need back in time and served the purpose well. As organizations grow, they feel the need to consolidate information that is in these siloed systems. Siloed systems work well on their own but also pose challenges as business grows and more visibility into the systems is needed.  

This article puts forward some thoughts on re-thinking siloed systems vs. integrated systems under one platform. 

Challenges with Siloed Systems

1. Information slips through the cracks, and with changing hands, set protocols are not followed to ensure data hygiene.  

2. With maturing business, data trapped in these systems starts to become interdependent on data from other systems—like order data with accounting data being in two different systems.  

3. Since data becomes interdependent on data from other systems, manual intervention comes into the picture, thus increasing the risk of human error and often missing important data altogether.  

4. Integration becomes the need of the hour, and this adds up implementation efforts.  

5. Also, resources at the organization need to learn all these different systems—so a learning curve hinders the ease of doing business for the team members as well. 

Need for Integrated Systems

1. Single Source of Truth: When you have a master system, let’s say, Dynamics. It becomes the single source of truth for services automation to be in place as all the users of these systems are looking at a single copy of the data.  

2. This reduces any dependencies on other systems and minimizes the risk of data being mismatched or being absent entirely.  

3. This approach reduces the technology learning curve for the users and the implementation cycles for these systems independently. 

4. As for Dynamics 365, since everything comes under one ecosystem – applications like Sales/Customer Service/Project Operations can be integrated to accounting systems like Business Central and F&O 

5. Systems like Microsoft Azure can be used for integration between these limited systems, and Azure helps keep control in terms of what needs to be integrated and provides visibility into the integration itself without having third-party system integrations, which are usually black boxes for end users.  

6. Simplified IT management of these systems with costs is an added benefit.  

Conclusion  

1. Instead of having several siloed systems that are not connected with each other, the approach for adoption should be to bring everything under a common eco-system, and the applications of dedicated purposes are consolidated and connected with each other through robust integration.  

2. This also helps in having insightful reports. 

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