In a conference last month called ‘Ignite’ Microsoft ran a demo where a representative from the company spoke to his computer, asking it to search the web and his computer to find files in specific topics. The computer promptly completed these tasks. He then asked his computer to drill into the statistics of attendees at Microsoft conferences. The computer promptly completed these tasks. He then began asking the kind of simple questions business managers spend countless hours seeking simple answers to, like “which countries are my best customers in?”, and “how many PCs do my customers have by industry?”. The computer promptly answered these questions.
While the technology powering the voice recognition offered an exciting glimpse into the future of work, the real working horse in these examples was Microsoft’s Power BI – a data visualiser which the company touts as a service which “transforms your company’s data in rich visuals for you to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you”.
While this all seems dazzling, it can be very confusing for people new to the world of enterprise business software, where different options slot in. Power BI advertises powerful sales and marketing features on its home page, yet also shows off its integration with Salesforce CRM. Do you need just Power BI, just Salesforce, both, both integrated? We’ll take a look at some of the more common types of business software, and how RTOs can use these efficiently.
ERP Software
Some of the earliest business software applications came under the banner of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – a term used now to refer to software that can collect, store, manage and interpret data across all core business functions. ERP software integrates information from business activities that typically now have their own dedicated software tools (such as marketing and sales, shipping and payment), but the focus of the software can be found in the name – Resource Planning. The crux of ERP systems is to ensure production and inventory run in sync, with most software vendors originating from a manufacturing core. Generally, only large sized businesses see significant returns on deploying ERP systems.
The big horse in the house is SAP, the world’s largest business software company, and maker of SAP ERP – software widely used among Fortune 500 companies. As many products and customers have turned digital, the lines between the need for ERP tools and effective marketing management tools have blurred slightly. SAP has recently announced a partnership with new kid on the block, Adobe, whose Marketing Cloud tools have been lauded as bringing a laser-focus to the young world of digital marketing. The partnership aims to “provide clients with a complete solution for omni-channel customer experience”. Many see this as a wise move for SAP, as the relatively newer CRM and marketing automation tools have been capturing a lot more attention in the business world lately.
Marketing Software
After years of ruling the creative design space, Adobe launched itself even deeper into the business application world with its Adobe Marketing Cloud tools in 2012. Initially aimed at the advertising industry, the tools have seen widespread adoption on the client side and many believe their full potential is yet to be seen. Recently Adobe purchased Neolane, rebranding it ‘Adobe Campaign’ which they promote as software that “…enables marketing departments to create contextually relevant email messages for consumers based on various criteria, including location, time and date, weather and more. The software allows businesses to create messages that automatically shift based on when the email is opened, and taking into account a customer’s recent activity. Paired with the other Adobe Marketing Cloud tools, businesses can automate the creation of rich customer experiences – bringing efficiency to this elusive, and traditionally time-consuming marketing goal.
While many are excited about the new potential Adobe is bringing to the space, the throne of marketing software has sat for a long time with Salesforce. Originating as a sales support system, Salesforce has expanded its scope rapidly with the purchase of Pardot, ExactTarget and Radian6 – a collection of marketing tools which allows businesses to create a complete path-to-purchase plane for prospects. While many of the features and processes overlap with ERP software, Salesforce takes a decidedly customer-centric approach to its system, placing campaign and communication management at the forefront of the work process. Salesforce recently beefed up it’s hindquarters by partnering with Google and Cloudera to create opportunities for super-advanced data mining on large volumes of information collected online. Industry watchers are excited about the potential for this partnership to bring about new innovated marketing techniques.
Finance Software
While many businesses invest heavily in their marketing tools, it’s easy to get taken away and forget about the true driver of any business – finance management. The biggest player here is Netsuite. The company began as NetLedger – a web-hosted accounting package – and has come to offer ERP, CRM and E-Commerce packages. Like the software packages mentioned previously, there is a huge amount of overlap between the features Netsuite offers and those of the other packages, but their prized equine is NetSuite Oneworld, with “capabilities for multinational companies such as the ability to manage multiple subsidiaries, currencies, accounting standards and tax requirements.” These features are becoming increasingly important for businesses of all sizes as an ever-larger proportion of purchases are pushed online, and a bigger ratio of customers are from overseas. As we talked about in a previous blog, the boundaries between technology and finance are loosening at a higher level, with Netsuite and American Express announcing a partnership recently to push all of American Express Global Business Travel financial operations onto the finance platform. Solid finance management is becoming increasingly important for Australian businesses as they deal with increasing regulation. This is especially true for the RTO industry, which has to dedicate a large amount of its time to reporting compliance. Of course, for many RTOs, Netsuite would be considered a sledgehammer to drive in a nail. Many RTOs would be looking more at SME finance solutions such as Xero, MYOB and Intuit. Definitely the preference now is for cloud-based solutions, which easily integrate with other cloud-based business systems.
Putting together a system for your business
While it can be extraordinarily difficult and frustrating trying to decide exactly what business software your company requires (because your student management system may not be able to manage all your information system needs), the key point to consider is what processes in your businesses can justify the cost of a particular software solution. Is there sufficient ‘scale’ or volume of transactions to justify the investment in new software. The other major consideration relates to what extent each software solution will need to integrate with other critical business systems (typically via an application programming interface or API). It’s also important that this integration is elegant and seamless, rather than clunky and cumbersome. Only careful user testing against a defined use case scenario(s) will determine how well an integration works for a specific organisation. There are numerous stories of businesses spending a fortune setting up complicated software systems to manage their business, only to find that they have never achieved the return on investment in time or money. There are also, however, some shining examples of organisations implementing software systems that have saved them thousands of hours of time. Success comes down to three simple questions – 1) What processes could be sped up with software? 2) Is purchasing the software worth the money? 3) Is implementing the software worth the time?