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| | The Marketing, Channels/Partnership & Sales Execs Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | On-Line Enterprise Automation | Views: 982 | | Dec 03, 2005 4:10 am | | On-Line Enterprise Automation | # |
Ryan Murphy | | I've been damaging my brain lately trying to catch up with all of the business acronyms (ERP, CSM, CMS, SFA, CRM, POS, VOIP, etc. etc.) and understanding what an Enterprise Business is and does to automate. And I mean everything ... from prospecting, bidding & sales point of entry to job tracking, commission tracking, contractor tracking, vendor tracking, upselling/cross-selling, inventory management, invoicing, shipping, client payment tracking, accounting, all the way to collections if necessary. It's what I want for my own business. Oh, and I want it accessible on-line, so I can run a "virtual business." Is that too much to ask for this X-Mas?
I have an IT consultant that is helping me figure out what is possible to connect business automation tools like the above acronyms into an enterprise solution/accounting package. We might be developing some custom programs to integrate into Quickbooks Pro through their SDK network (Software Development Kit). Don't get me started on technology acronyms ...
Anyway, it seems in our search for the best overall solution, the accounting package is the most important piece. Everything else would be made to integrate with whatever accounting solution seems to be the best. Quickbooks Pro is convenient because it is cheap, and used en-masse, which could be a nice service to sell to other businesses once we figure it out for ourselves. But by no means am I stuck on using Quickbooks Pro.
So here's what I'm looking for out of this post:
First, am I right that the accounting package is the most important piece to a fully integrated/automated enterprise solution? If not, what is?
Second, what else is there that I may be missing? What are the total pieces to an enterprise solution (generally speaking)? And can they all be integrated/automated?
Third, what other types of automation tools are there that I can utilize for this process? What other cool secrets can you share with me in regards to this objective I have?
For instance, I have found some nice features on Paypal: Paypal provides free shopping cart (albeit rudimentary), but also includes recurring billing capabilities that can be stopped after a pre-determined period of cycles. Perfect for use as a payment plan giving the customer the confidence to use a payment method that can even access their bank account if they choose to pay that way (and therefore provides very easy access to pay and very little excuse not to pay). I can see automating payments and collections using this tool and integrating it into our overall solution. Quickbooks can send invoices via email with a paypal button to pay, making it a much more automated and shorter collections process. No more "we'll send you a check in a couple days ..."
Sorry for the long post ... believe me, there's so much more ...
I appreciate all your feedback.
Ryan Private Reply to Ryan Murphy | | Dec 21, 2005 7:40 am | | re: On-Line Enterprise Automation | # | 
Chris Stolk | | Hi Ryan,
First, there is no panacea that covers every Enterprise: each Enterprise, and every other company, has unique requirements. Therefore, trying to build one system that does everything is an exercise in futility, uless you have gobs of money, in which case we need to have a much longer conversation;-)
In general, the Accounting piece is very important. Whether it is the most important piece is debatable. You don't need and accounting system if you don't have sales, so the CRM piece is pretty valuable as well. If you get the sales, but have no products to ship, then you have more problems. So there is no one piece that is most imnportant. At any given time, depending on your business and level of automation, the most important piece is generally the one that you don't have or is not the right solution.
There are very good solutions out there for many aspects of your business. Aside from Quickbooks, there are a pluthera of solutions (MS Dynamics, Peachtree, MYOB, SAP, Oracle, etc.) that can do one or many Enterprise Management tasks. Some are better than others, some cover more than others, and soome cost more than others.
A lot of solution providers are now focusing on integrating best-of-breed solutions to come up with Enterpriuse management tools that go beyond the traditional ERP/Accounting packages. While SAP has been pretty successful in building a monolithic application, there are many shortcomings and pitfalls in the approach, not to mention that the price tag can be daunting for any company not in the Global Fortune 5000.
Hope my 2 cents helped. Best of luck in your endeavor!
ChrisPrivate Reply to Chris Stolk | | |
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