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.
Automation can reduce workforce costs
Automating data entry with integration is one way to reduce costs in your business. Automation achieves this in two ways: reducing hiring costs and the number of errors in your data.
Manual data entry can drive high costs associated with talent. If someone spends two hours daily on manual data entry, they can become dissatisfied with their work because they are not using their skills on meaningful tasks. If their workload increases, you might need to hire someone else, and now you are paying more to have two people complete tasks that you could automate. If you automate some of these repetitive tasks, you will find that much of this is unnecessary. Instead, your team can focus on tasks that leverage their valuable skills so you can add more functions to the business without hiring more people.
Manual data entry gives way to errors. Your customer service team might not have the most up-to-date information and make mistakes when dealing with customers, leading to lost business. You could also make a business decision based on faulty data, meaning that your choices do not generate the returns you expected. Automating data entry and synchronisation across systems means you can regain trust in your data and reduce the cost of mistakes.
Scale your business while keeping costs low
Reducing costs does not mean reducing the quality of your operations. You can drive growth and efficiency with the right data integration solution while keeping costs low.
Data integration centralises the collection and analysis of data from different systems such as third-party services, databases, enterprise applications, websites, etc. When your systems speak to each other like this, you can leverage data to develop new products and services, address issues with your operations and deliver better customer experiences.
For example, we automated data flow between systems for our customer, Wizard Pharmacy. After completing the systems integration project, Wizard Pharmacy found they could scale the business without increasing costs. Automation allowed them to expand customer reach and promote more channels without the cost of hiring more full-time staff.
Reduce overhead costs by moving to the cloud
Data integration creates a catalyst for moving your business to the cloud or leveraging Software as a Service (SaaS) products. It can help you leverage the power of the cloud by providing easy access to your data (since every SaaS product these days has comprehensive and easy-to-implement APIs), which gives you the ability to identify and respect the ‘single source of truth’ (SSOT).
What I mean by respecting the SSOT, is that when you clearly know where the data comes from and where it needs to go to, and if you can automate the data transfers, then your business systems will have the right information at the right times. Data integration tools in the cloud make it easier to analyse and optimise existing processes, gain insight into customer behaviour, and find new growth opportunities.
Making these changes within your business can lower expenses such as electricity and insurance costs and minimise upgrades, security patches and infrastructure failures, which helps you avoid the costs of downtime and unplanned CapEx costs.
You can also avoid the overhead costs of running and maintaining a data centre because you pay for cloud solutions based on your usage. As a result, you can leverage the scalability and flexibility of the cloud to quickly adjust your infrastructure according to changing needs. Furthermore, cloud computing eliminates costs associated with energy consumption and physical space, allowing you to reduce even more costs.
Creative Folks is your partner in data integration
When we work with customers who need their systems talking to each other, we look at their applications and the underlying services they offer and then overlay that with their strategy, goals and initiatives. Our expertise lies in understanding your ecosystem, highlighting the possibilities, presenting the options and deploying the right cloud integration and data integration solution - in the right order - for you.
Visit our Systems Integration page for more on our capabilities.
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