Is your company plugged in?

Is your company plugged in?

As an owner or a decision-maker in your company, there is high possibility that you have had these questions confronting you at some time or the other.

1. Does my company really keep pace with the ever-changing environment in our industry, both inside and outside of the country?
2. Has my Finance team ever processed an invoice without knowing that there is a recent litigation against a supplier?
3. While engaging a supplier, is my Procurement team aware if the supplier has been blacklisted by any other company?
4. Does my procurement strategy dependent on a few vendors? Maybe one of those has just been taken over by a company half-way across the world? Maybe they had a shareholding of a foreign entity a few quarters back?
5. Would I really want to engage with a customer who has not been paying their vendors in a timely manner?
6. How sure can I be that my sales team is engaging with a customer without knowing whether the customer’s profits are falling year after year?
7. Are we deploying our sales team to the right customers, the ones who are growing and who really need our services?

Most companies believe that if they have a strong digitization program, then these problems have taken care of. However, that can only be far away from the truth.

How do you make sure that everybody gets to see the real time information and insights from a single source even though all these teams are looking at different systems and different software applications and platforms?

Having a strong digitization program can ensure that employees from different functions look at the same data. This is known as having a ‘single source of truth’. Where there is common information that is available to all functions, everyone in the organization pulls it forward in the same direction. This certainly drives efficiency, coherence and a single purpose. With me so far?

But, that’s just half the story! Now for the dangers.

The Dangers

The danger is that if you have an ERP system, or multiple core systems linked to each other, it only drives efficiency if there is uniformity of information WITHIN the company. However, that information changes only when the organisation is told about a ‘change event’, and the same is updated into the central data repository. Hopefully you have a central repository in the first place – else it will be the same change in multiple places, that’s all!

Now this update takes time, and it is during this lag where an organisation is at risk. The quantum of the risk depends upon the decisions you take daily – whether in the area of credit decisioning, credit policies, risk management, compliance to the policies of the organization or the country, or even knowing whom to target as the next set of customers.

The Solution

Be Plugged-in!  Make your enterprise plugged in to the various events, both positive and detrimental, so that whatever the situation may be, you are in the right place to make the correct decision for your company.

This can happen only if all your systems are plugged into a single data source with a singular purpose of keeping the data refreshed and serving you the latest information on events, issues, and insights. Thus, it enables you to take better-informed decisions.

The only way to do this is to have reliable partner who can update all this information about your ecosystem partners, shifting country policies, and evolving company policies, into a single data lake. The partner then plugs it into various systems in the organization so that everyone gets the same information and therefore can derive maximum benefit from these timely and valuable insights.

An organisation needs to ensure it has dynamic data management. This could be as basic as making sure that latest financial information about your ecosystem partners is updated in your data lake, or getting the latest detrimental information about your ecosystem partners, including litigation, legal lawsuits and even bankruptcy. These events should ideally be fed into your systems on real-time basis, based on which various functions including sales, marketing, legal, finance and operations can take the right decision at the right time.

In many ways, the same data lake can also give you early warning signals and feed it into different systems in your organization. This way, your business is not only keeping pace with the actual events that are happening outside your organization but can probably be a few steps ahead of the maddening pace of changes in the business environment.

So, don’t just digitize in isolation; digitize in way that your organization can be plugged-in!