As your organisation grows and changes, then a system upgrade will be needed to assist in that growth. If you are finding that things are not as efficient as you suspect they could be, it might be time to take a long, hard look at your current softsare systems and consider what’s working and what isn’t.
New software falls into three ‘purpose’ categories:
- Consolidation
- Integration
- Expansion
Here are some situations you may recognise.
Consolidation as part of your sysem upgrade
Over time people develop their own little ways of doing things. There’s a spreadsheet here, a database there, a junior running a manual notebook; the problem is that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing!
When everyone has got their own systems and they don’t all talk to each other there is a problem. Information received by one department isn’t always passed on to another. For instance, the membership team receive notice of the death of a member, but their system is separate to the marketing team, so information continues to be sent out.
Every time someone adds a spreadsheet or database activity, it’s another opportunity for errors to be made. Bespoke software can take all these tasks that people do and consolidate them into a single software that everyone has access to and where updated information is global, not local!
System Upgrade Integration
Over time organisations bring in various software systems to do specific jobs, only to discover that they’re not all compatible and data has to be entered in several places. This creates ‘holes’ in the organisation’s information, down which data can disappear simply because Accounts doesn’t have the same information as Purchasing. Important notes entered in one place are missing from the other.
Integration is about creating software solutions that allow all these independent systems to connect up.
Depending on the age of the software it may be more cost-effective to have a new system created that actually delivers faster and better results. That can pay for itself by allowing staff to be more productive and do more in less time.
System Upgrade Expansion
This is a different issue and encompasses new demands and a different way of managing data due to the organisation’s growth. New tasks need to be done or what used to be an occasional task and could be done by someone in half an hour a week, has now become almost a full-time job.
If tasks can be automated it delivers savings in staff time and cost.
The challenge where bespoke software is being developed to do new things, is to ensure that all the existing systems can be either consolidated or integrated.
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