Growth gets complicated
Growth gets complicated
You’ve put your heart and soul into building your business. Your dream has become reality, but keeping all the moving parts working smoothly is getting tricky. You’ve cobbled some software together to manage sales, marketing and operations, but employees are spending too much time on spreadsheets. It’s hard to keep inventory balanced without knowing what stock is promised. And forecasting still feels more like guessing. The time has come to move from startup mode to operational efficiency — the only way to ensure consistent customer experiences. You need business management software that will support your long-term growth. In this white paper, we’ll explain why a cloudbased, single-source financial and commerce management platform may be the best answer for your business.
Eliminate manual processes for operational efficiency
The most fundamental business benefit from technology comes through the automation of manual processes. As your business grows, tasks that were once easy — such as forecasting, procurement, order management and service scheduling — require more input, more data and much more time.
Avoid spreadsheets and disconnected systems
Responding to immediate needs as the business has grown, you’ve likely added software that doesn’t fit neatly together. Now, you’re working with an accounting system that doesn’t talk to the customer relationship management (CRM) system, or an order-entry system with no visibility into what’s shipping. The list goes on. To bridge the gaps, employees often use spreadsheets.
Grow the business without growing the payroll
Through a unified financial, operations and commerce management solution, you can connect business processes and automate manual tasks. Workflow automation will keep orders flowing through the system, approvals on track and projects moving forward. A fully integrated business management system will allow you to:
- Eliminate spreadsheets that cut efficiency and push data out of the system
- Reduce time spent on manual reconciliations
- Speed up the financial close process with rule-based allocations and consolidations
- Save employees from checking three different systems to get the answers they need
Automating business processes through a unified, dynamic system will empower employees to get more done, allowing you to grow the business without growing the payroll.
Make interactions easy for customers and vendors
The cloud (and Amazon) has forever changed the expectations of your customers — whether they are consumers or businesses. Customers want instant access to account information, pricing options and order status. Vendors want to automate business processes and work more collaboratively.
Eliminate pre-cloud business systems
When your company is trying to operate in a connected world with less-than-modern and on-premises business applications, you have to extend systems the old-fashioned way. Cobbling together customer portals, EDI and lines of business (LOB) with custom integrations can bridge the gaps until it’s time for an upgrade. And, those outdated systems just can’t support today’s standards of customer service.
Get single-source information for anwers at real-time speed anwhere
With a fully integrated financial and commerce management system, every business function relies on a single database. Employees have visibility into orders, fulfillment, billing information and more to answer questions on the fly. Centralized data allows you to:
- Provide self-service capabilities via portals for customers, vendors and partners, which frees up sales and service teams to focus on issues that need a personal approach
- Give sales and service representatives visibility into schedules and orders from placement through delivery so they can respond to questions instantly
- Collaborate with trading partners on marketing and promotions to work as a team
With unified business software that supports modern business practices, you can demonstrate your commitment to making every customer and partner interaction easier
Improve forecasting to meet demand and control costs
Keeping track of all the moving parts as your business expands would be easier if demand kept to a straight line. Since that’s not so in the real world, you need forecasting that will help you plan for the curves, both up and down.
Eliminate systems that only look at the past
Since most accounting systems report only on the transactions of the past, spreadsheets became the forecasting tool of choice. While Microsoft Excel is flexible and easy to use, it often requires duplicate entries and time to build reports, and there is always a risk of errors. By the time you’ve collected and updated the budgets and forecasts, you’re still looking at the past.
Get insights beyond spreadsheets
With the financial planning capabilities of a centralized business management solution, you can tap the data from current operations, trends and sales to look forward with more confidence. Budgeting and forecasting that goes beyond spreadsheets will allow you to:
- Include sales pipelines and seasonal trends in the forecasting analysis
- Monitor trends and changes in consumption at every level of your supply chain to adjust purchasing decisions and optimize inventory
- Compare and evaluate differing scenarios between actuals and projections to update forecasts and respond to change
To prepare for the ups and downs of business trends, you need a unified financial, operations and commerce management solution that will tap every available piece of data to improve your view of the future.
Deliver data that empowers employees
Your customers are not alone in expecting you to put information within easy reach. Employees, especially younger workers, expect the business to use data and technology to make their work easier and continually improve operations.
Avoid the frustrating search for answers
Whether they are trying to answer a customer question, put a proposal together or find out whether a shipment has arrived, it’s frustrating for employees when the information they need is trapped in an outdated accounting system or a spreadsheet somewhere. When you’ve hired employees who want to do great work, you don’t want them to waste their time searching.
Spend more time on high-value work
When the entire business taps into the single database through an integrated business management system that is accessible in the office or on-the-go, your staff can spend less time searching and more time on high-value tasks that grow the business. With a single version of the truth that allows you to control, automate and analyze information gathered from every part of the organization, you can:
- Provide executives with a holistic view of business operations in real time
- Give employees self-serve options, including easy-to-use reporting tools, so they can see just what they need, any time they need it
- Deliver a 360-degree view of customers, allowing sales and service representatives to answer questions and proactively upsell and cross-sell
- Provide on-the-go access to information via a web browser or mobile device
- Arm employees with the data they need to do their best and grow the business with a unified financial, operations and commerce management solution
Simplify work with one business management solution
When your company is growing, you need every employee to operate at optimal productivity. By taking full advantage of today’s technology, you can get there. Automating manual processes using data that flows across functions simplifies everything.
Prevent workaround proliferation
As you are building the company, the workarounds — processes that your employees use because the accounting system doesn’t support them — seem like the easiest path. But over time, the spreadsheets multiply, tracking everything from back orders to shipping addresses to asset depreciation. And more and more time gets spent keeping those spreadsheets straight.
Build a firm foundation for growth
To build for the future, your business needs to get rid of the spreadsheets and manage operations as one. With a single database, natively integrated business management solution providing the key functionality you need for accounting, inventory, customer relationship management (CRM), professional services automation (PSA) and e-commerce, you can unleash the potential of your employees with:
- Automation of manual processes and workflows so that employees can use their time to proactively manage exceptions and spend more time with customers
- Information that can be accessed instantly from almost anywhere without wasting resources on data extraction, and that ties data from different sources together
- Adaptable business processes to support changing business models and customer expectations
Let a unified financial, operations and commerce management solution do the heavy lifting and give your staff more time to focus on growing the business.
Focus on business growth instead of IT
Technology plays a key role in every business today. But for most businesses, technology is a means to an end, not the reason for being. While you want to use technology to the fullest, you don’t want it to distract you from your primary objectives.
Help IT be proactive planners
When you are operating the business with disconnected business systems, the IT team spends most of its time fighting fires. Dealing with performance issues, testing integrations before an upgrade and building reports all keep them from proactive planning to help the business use technology as a strategic advantage.
Seize the opportunity
When the opportunity to accelerate growth presents itself, you need to be ready. Cloud-based business management systems provide instant access to the software that can support new sales channels, acquisitions or product line expansion. A fully integrated system makes it easier for your IT pros to help you scale with:
- No upfront investment of on-premises systems, system upgrades and downtime from upgrades or system issues
- Instant visibility into performance, so you can respond quickly to changing conditions
- A version-less solution that gives you instant access to the latest research and development functionality that the platform offers
- Assurance of the security of your data and business continuity
With cloud-based software, platforms and infrastructure, your business can respond to change with streamlined processes, simplified IT, better visibility and access anywhere.
Uncomplicate your business
Let us help you get rid of some of these complications to prepare your business for continued growth. DXC Eclipse specializes in helping midmarket customers solve challenges unique to growing companies, from ordering, billing and customer relationship management to process improvements, revenue and project management.
Building on the NetSuite platform, the No. 1 cloud business management software suite, we focus on driving measurable results that reduce IT costs, improve organizational efficiencies — and deliver all the benefits of a seamless cloud solution. The DXC Eclipse team has helped thousands of organizations improve their back-office functions through the implementation of best-in-class cloud technologies and customized solutions. Our team of experts uses a consultative approach to build a solution that will support your operational goals.
Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) designed for growing companies
Midmarket companies require efficient, highly scalable business management solutions to grow a changing, complex business. Much more than a traditional ERP, NetSuite delivers a proven, comprehensive solution that offers ERP, CRM, e-commerce and PSA in one unified platform. NetSuite takes your business beyond traditional accounting software by streamlining operations across your entire organization and providing you with the real-time visibility you need to make better, faster decisions.
Why DXC Eclipse?
DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology, helps enterprise and midmarket companies accelerate digital transformation, solve business challenges and deliver intelligent solutions that make a difference for customers, employees and partners. We believe in delivering expertise, project transparency and excellent customer service in every engagement.
With team members in North America, EMEA, Asia and Australia-New Zealand, we are uniquely positioned to deliver ERP, CRM, business process, analytics and collaboration solutions to customers across the globe. We are a 5 Star NetSuite Solution Provider that helps companies propel growth and outpace the competition. DXC Eclipse serves more than 4,000 customers across multiple industries, delivering services and solutions that positively impact our world today and into the future.