Across the globe, countless companies are using old, unintegrated, user-unfriendly and outdated software solutions to run their business. This inevitably leads to inefficiencies in today's fast-paced world of demanding and impatient customers. Surely you know better solutions. But for some reason, you are not yet ready to implement this knowledge. Do you have any idea how much it costs to use these outdated business software solutions while you wait?
Cycles of modernization
In the western world, companies modernize their ERP and CRM solutions every 8 to 10 years. This is usually done as an upgrade or full replacement. In some industries, this number is trending upwards due to the current crisis. However, another reason is that many organizations are putting off these projects - even when they should be taking action.
Why is the modernization of company software being postponed?
There are several reasons! Apart from the question of who is to blame for the fact that the old solutions no longer fit. And the complexity and expense of replacing them. And is afraid that if a project fails, their own CV could look bad.
How does such a delay affect business activities?
The list of consequences is long. Here we have selected a few issues that can have a significant impact on your business:
- Maintaining high total cost of ownership ('TCO') inevitably associated with using on-premise software solutions based on your own server hardware and internal system management.
- The costs of your current poor or dysfunctional business processes will continue. And will even increase if you don't fix these weaknesses quickly. This can lead to negative trends in customer and employee satisfaction. And ultimately to the loss of customers and the departure of employees.
- By delaying modernization, your current manual processes make you dependent on the knowledge of your older employees, who will soon be leaving your company when they retire.
- Perhaps most importantly, you're missing out on the continuous innovation we're seeing in cloud-based solutions today. All of the leading ERP and CRM solution providers have shifted their R&D investments to their cloud products. So if you are still running solutions on your own premises, this means that the availability of new features and innovations will slow down. And eventually stop altogether.
Conclusion
Modernizing your business software requires a serious investment. But continuing to use outdated solutions could end up costing you a fortune!