Managing Diverse Corporate Systems

Introduction

Medium sized businesses generally find themselves running separate systems for Accounts, Payroll, Asset Management and any other systems their business requires such as Inventory Control and Customer Management. This often creates difficulties when it comes time to put together coherent management reporting. Businesses find that the information being extracted from the separate systems often project conflicting figures and the relationships do not exist within the data to bind it all together into a single picture.

Possible Issues & Problems

This array of problems and issues often unnecessarily leads managers down the path of upgrading all of their individual systems into a single sourced, united Enterprise Solution. This is often fraught with danger due to:

·         The high costs of an enterprise solution

·         The time required to change over all the systems

·         The loss of productivity during change over

·         The loss of productivity due to systems that are not as good a fit to the business as the original systems were.

·         The risk to total project failure

There is also the issue that the Enterprise Solution might not fix any of the underlying problems. Without a solid understanding of the existing system and the data relationships it is next to impossible to design an Enterprise Solution that resolves the underlying issues.

A Practical Solution

Taking a pragmatic and cost efficient view of the situation, managers can quite rightly conclude that they:

·         Do not actually require an Enterprise Solution, or

·         Require a better understanding of their underlying data before embarking on an Enterprise Solution.

What the business can do is unite the data from all of their disparate systems into a single Management Information Repository using software specifically designed to manage and resolve data relationships such as Ace.

The process of collecting and integrating the data also acts as an audit on the entire suite of corporate systems which most organizations use to manage their day to day operations. This process will reveal any underlying issues that may be inhibiting the flow and quality of data within the business. This can lead to gains in information quality and productivity as the transfer of data between the systems is automated and improved. This means that the systems that serve the staff well from an operating point of view can be retained rather than changing them unnecessarily.

Conclusion

Once data is collated and the inter relationships between data sources understood, management is able take steps to improve data quality and management reporting. While further modeling and data mining can provide invaluable management information this first step of simply examining and processing the basic data will give a management team an invaluable insight into their systems without any overwhelming increase in the team’s day to day management workload. It also provides a sound basis from which to proceed to undertake further mathematical modeling/business analysis or in fact embark on a project to incorporate an enterprise solution.