No matter what system you implement; a whole ERP (such as NetSuite) designed to manage your entire business; or a point solution (such as SugarCRM) that addresses a specific departmental need.
There comes a day where manual processes, such as entering customer orders from the phone, emails or fax, or moving information between a CRM system and a finance system, or entering of billable time by your employees becomes a burden.
The natural reaction, surprisingly, is to add staff. But, that is really not a good solution:
- Costs go up significantly; and sometimes without you noticing
- It is not scalable by any stretch of the imagination
- It is manual and with that come accuracy issues
Perhaps a better answer is to look at improving processes by Managed Integrations.
Managed Integrations are all about taking a business process (that repeats), such as customers placing orders and reps manually entering these orders, and changing this process so, in this case, customers can place orders directly and effortlessly into your system.
This means there is no manual intervention needed for these "repeat" orders and the process becomes:
- Scalable
- Fluid
- Accurate
Now, what is important to realize is that you probably have moved or are in the process of moving to a software as a service solution in order to eliminate year over year distractions and IT costs. That makes complete sense.
Integration should be no different.
You could argue that you can do your own integrations using in-house IT staff. However, this is on no use to you since you will be burdened with having to design your connections, the API connectors and also the hard part; the solution and process flow itself. Not to mention maintenance of such connections.
So to eliminate headaches and distractions; Tactics has created a service called Managed Integration.