If your business is growing, you may realize that spreadsheets don’t adequately manage your business processes and assets. As you grow, your data gets more complex and dynamic, which calls for a different medium to help things stay organized and streamlined.
There are many types of business management software that are well worth your investment to maximize your business’s profitability and ensure your operations continue running smoothly. However, it’s important to analyze software functionality and how it relates to your business operations before implementing it into your processes. Understanding what features are important to you is essential to not only selecting the best software, but to fully leveraging it and improving your operations.
Customer Relationship Management Software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software provides you with advanced yet organized customer data which can be used to analyze production efforts, inventory, and consumer behaviors. When implementing functional CRM software, employees from different departments can communicate and connect to narrow in on your business’s goals seamlessly as a strong unit. With improved coordination and streamlined efforts from employees based on accurate customer data, you can increase your business’s profitability and trajectory toward lofty sales goals.
Product Lifecycle Management Software
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software is another important piece of the software integration puzzle because it allows you to manage the lifecycle of a product efficiently and accurately. This type of software helps you to trace the lifecycle from the product’s ideation and first design to its manufacturing process, which is crucial for retailers.
PLM software also helps you track sales so you can analyze consumer responses and make changes as needed. Most all-encompassing PLM systems also include on-call customer support, taking the daunting and time-consuming task of troubleshooting off your hands and allowing you to cut operational costs and potentially reduce staff.
Enterprise Resource Planning Software
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provides structure to your organizational management. In the apparel industry, you may be dealing with a vast array of product sizes, colors, and styles. ERP software helps your business stay organized and allows consistent access to accurate data at a moment’s notice.
ERP solutions used to be out of reach for small businesses due to their hefty price tags. However, the ERP software market is predicted to grow to around $86 billion by 2022. These ERP solutions have become much more affordable so many businesses, both large and small, can easily implement these solutions into their daily operations.
The Importance of Software Integration
Enterprise integration software solutions are important, especially if you want your growing business to continue providing satisfactory customer service. With business management software, you can increase your efficiency and reduce your operating costs. Employees can improve their collaboration efforts while streamlining the way they manage their tasks. This ensures compliance among your workforce and provides workers with the crucial tools they need to succeed.
Data Integration Tools
Data integration tools are arguably the most important since they can provide you with a comprehensive view of your business operations. With this view, you can streamline the ordering process, making sure your customers are happy and loyal to your brand. ApparelMagic data integration tools incorporate the best apps in the fashion industry and advanced mobile tools to ensure you’re providing your customers with an easy and efficient ordering system and experience.
Finding Software That Meets Your Needs
To find the right software solution, you’ll need to assess your business’s needs and analyze specific software benefits to ensure the implementation makes sense for your bottom line.
Evaluating Your Business Needs
Your business’s needs are also your business’s current inefficiencies. When you can identify the blemishes in your current business processes, you can better pinpoint the type of software you need. To evaluate your business’s needs, you’ll need to:
- Create baseline measurements of your business’s processes and systems, including customer satisfaction, finances, and product manufacturing expenses.
- Use employees from all departments to help you create a list of inefficiencies and potential solutions to these inefficiencies.
- Analyze how these potential solutions will affect your business and attempt to predict the outcomes.
- Set goals for your business.
- Create an actionable plan to reach these goals.
- Conclude with a list of the tools you need to follow through with your plan.
When you’ve identified your inefficiencies and how to negate these inefficiencies through an actionable plan, you can pinpoint the tools your software needs to provide to implement your plan for smoother processes and procedures.
Determining Software Benefits
It’s not enough to simply identify the software benefits your business needs. You’ll also need to do some research into the software on the market to ensure these benefits outweigh the costs. Measure how much more efficiency and profitability specific software will likely provide your business. Before investing, make sure you’re confident that the software you choose will reduce errors or redundancies in your processes. Ensure it will reduce operational costs by decreasing your need for staff or other expensive software.
To determine whether the software will provide your business these benefits, ask for a demonstration within your business processes. This will allow you to see the software in action so you can better determine how your organization’s performance will improve after implementation. If you’re ready to take the best business management software for a spin to see how many inefficiencies it can smooth out in your organization, review the ApparelMagic fashion software demo.
