Australian Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) saw a record high in 2021, with the deals announced exceeding the average of the preceding five years. By comparison, 2022 appeared to be a slower year, but a survey by PwC found that 58% of CEOs were not planning to delay deals despite concerns over economic challenges.

For companies completing an M&A, addressing integration challenges must be high on the priority list. An M&A is more than acquiring customers and services; you also acquire the data and processes that support the business. Legacy systems or data silos likely already exist. If these remain unaddressed when merging, they could generate more problems that impact how the new business serves customers, delivers services or completes processes.

In M&A, I often see five data integration challenges arise. Have you accounted for these?

How many platforms does your marketing team use daily? From instant messaging to task management, the average business process runs across five or more systems. While adding more platforms over the last decade has undoubtedly brought more granular functionality to businesses (such as financial reporting, e-commerce, and CRM), if these platforms do not communicate, they can become major productivity blockers.

Perhaps your marketing team uses Wrike to plan projects and assign tasks, but do they use a different platform to report on progress? Do they have to access the content relevant to these tasks on a different platform?

If your answer to both of these questions is ‘Yes’, your business might greatly benefit from workflow integration (a.k.a. systems integration) to bring together all these platforms and processes. What are the benefits of such a solution?

Today, we live in a multichannel world where there are more ways to share content online and offline. You have likely seen a campaign printed on the side of a bus that you later saw in the sidebar of a website, recognisable due to the consistency of the advertisements and messaging. Perhaps the ad even mentioned the name of your city.

For a team to achieve this level of consistency and personalisation, they need full visibility of all content over online and offline channels. Yet, these systems are often disconnected from the content operations mechanics and require manual coordination between the marketing team, third-party providers and digital content creators.

Headless content delivery is one solution to this persistent problem. So, how does it work? And why is it a game-changer for scaling personalised content?

With any modern business, there’s an expectation that customers can interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints (which includes devices and platforms). The cross-platform personalised experience has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a minimum standard. Therefore, all those touchpoints within your business need to have that customer data readily available. But this is often not the case.

Adopting a new customer experience (CX) platform is an opportunity to enhance these customer interactions. But its real potential goes beyond the capabilities of the platform itself. The true value lies in its ability to connect all your existing customer touchpoints and enhance them. Too often, companies will adopt a new CX platform without first considering how it will fit within the current ecosystem, inadvertently creating more work for already busy teams as they work with disconnected platforms.

In this blog, I’ll suggest some key consideration points when adopting a new CX platform and common challenges to avoid.

The business landscape feels like it’s constantly changing around us. We have more functional, specific platforms at our fingertips; integration and automation are necessary, and AI tools have saturated the market. All of this creates the expectation that a business should be able to do more with less without sacrificing the quality of operations. As such, many leaders have one or many business transformations high on their priority list.

If you're among these leaders, it's important to consider the role of content in achieving process transformation. Whilst your marketing teams must efficiently produce reusable content that can be personalised for different audiences and channels for customer experience, it's also important to realise that content supports staff experiences in various business processes. Across sales, customer service, product support and maintenance, your business needs content to effectively function and to continue delivering the experience that the marketing team started at the inspiration stage.

Content management tools can help achieve these objectives by reducing manual steps and sharing content across systems, which help reduce operational costs, and ensure consistent and fast delivery of information to all teams, making it an essential consideration for any organisation undertaking process transformation.

For your business to adapt (or pivot) as market forces demand, you must be able to change your processes quickly. Your core systems generally stay intact, but how you use those core systems might need adjusting. You may also need to adjust how those systems interact with each other or with external systems.

With digital channels becoming the key platform to reach your target audience, creating high-quality content for omnichannel content delivery is more important than ever. Yet, managing content across these channels is challenging, especially without transparency and a centralised, overarching view of all the content at that stage.

Many content teams struggle with disjointed and chaotic processes. Different teams and individuals might work in isolation, using various tools and methods and lacking clear roles, responsibilities, and communication channels — the result is duplicated efforts, inconsistent quality, misaligned messaging, and wasted resources.

What’s the solution to problems like these? You need a transparent and standardised approach to content creation, distribution, and measurement to streamline workflows, improve collaboration, enhance relevance, and ultimately drive better results for your business.

Think for a moment about how you go about shopping online. You likely analyse product images and rely on descriptions to gain a clear understanding of the brand and product you might want to purchase. If you visit two e-commerce sites to compare prices, you might have noticed that occasionally the same branded product has different images on different e-commerce sites, and perhaps the product description is different too, or there is more information. One site might also contain more supporting content, such as ‘How to use guides’ or technical manuals, and others don’t.

A recent Deloitte report listed ‘Investing in advanced technologies to help mitigate risk’ as a key priority for the US manufacturing industry. Though this insight came from the US market, case studies from WoodWing have also revealed that European manufacturers have focused on digitalisation in recent years. As such, this priority should also be a key focus for the APAC region's manufacturing sector.

When it comes to reducing business costs, many people think of it as a cost-cutting exercise. While this approach has validity, it does not always yield the best results; making the wrong cuts could seriously damage your operations and the customer experience. Instead, I encourage you to think about cost reduction as an opportunity to optimise costs. Consider how you can get more from what you already have and find areas to optimise operations to reduce unnecessary costs.

Data integration provides numerous opportunities to reduce expenses across your business while enhancing your operations. It can maximise ROI, eliminate redundant data entry work and provide you with an opportunity to take advantage of cloud platforms.

Rather than grappling with multiple systems, you can reduce costs with a single source of truth for your data, ensuring that you work with accurate, up-to-date information.