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?
Michael Coorey
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?
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.
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.
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.
We can describe data integration in multiple ways and apply it to many situations, so let’s begin by looking at a couple of definitions…
Manual data entry across siloed systems drags down efficiency and accuracy in your organisation. Mundanity and repetition breeds mistakes as staff become disengaged with their work.
Traditional business models have relied on monthly, quarterly, or yearly planning to set strategic goals and define the next steps. Today, we live in a world where technology continues evolving, and customer expectations keep changing along with the market.
Gone are the days of five-year plans. The pace of disruption has reached an intensity such that any business model today could be unviable in five years.
An agile business plan is the key to success. You must be able to pivot quickly and make changes on the fly to stay ahead of the competition. One way to achieve this agility is through systems integration. Integrated systems bring together the data you need to make informed business decisions and find cut-through in the market.
The success of your business relies on your ability to make the right strategic bets. It feels like a tenuous line to walk with failure one wrong decision away. So how can you increase your chances of making the right decisions and ensuring you do not steer your company in the wrong direction?
Right now, technology companies worldwide churn out innovation at a rapid pace. Recent years have seen a sharp acceleration in the capabilities of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Each new technology and solution promises a compelling, unique benefit.
