With the maturity of data integration tools and platforms, enterprises have more extended opportunities to leverage in order to increase their ROI and sales rates. Investments in data integration can immensely optimize your business workflows, providing you with a 360-degree view of your customers, and consequently boosting your employees’ productivity. The thing is that synchronization of data is not always cheap, especially when your business scales and deals with huge amounts of data.
Fortunately, there are several tips to reduce extra costs and optimize your expenditures. The key thing here is your strategic approach to the implementation of data integration tools.
4 Tips to Reduce Your Data Integration Costs
1. Keep Your Data Clean And Up-To-Date
When choosing your data integration method, you need to focus on high data quality, which is the guarantee of your user-adoption improvement and the success of your data integration project in general. The main point is to create a clear data model and keep your data up-to-date. So how to integrate both CRM and ERP systems in a way to get cleaned and current data, thus minimizing your expenses?
There is no need to synchronize all data since it can be time-consuming and expensive; moreover, it can bring negative consequences such as a decrease in employees’ efficiency due to irrelevant information that overwhelms. That’s why it’s vital to properly evaluate the validity of the data you’re going to transfer from one system to another. For example, you could have outdated information in your CRM system. Does it represent any value when being duplicated in ERP software? Or do your back-office employees need insights regarding your leads? So think about this properly before deciding either to transfer your data or not.
2. Limit Customization
Businesses tend to use data to make more efficient impacts and understand their customers and market better. Looking for the best option for data integration, companies want to be sure it will meet their business goals and needs. That’s why they are likely to have customized solutions to benefit from the options these solutions offer to them.
But often, customization can be the reason for costs increase due to the redundancy of modules and features. Remember that custom add-ons are focused on supporting your enterprise- specific goals, but consequently will lead to off-budget risks.
Furthermore, you need to understand the risks and benefits of data-integration options: whether it is custom integration developed from scratch or a ready-to-use cloud-based platform with predefined-templates to make your integration process go smoothly and easily. A well-developed data integration platform has plenty of customized elements and can integrate all the customizations from your ERP and CRM systems, even though there are many changes made. Eventually, whenever possible, minimize the customization of your programs, and you will save up the budget for more business-focused intentions.
3. Develop A Long-Term Perspective
Focusing only on the current data integration needs and without a thoroughly defined strategy, your financial planning can have devastating consequences. Due to the lack of understanding of the data integration specifics of certain solutions and without comprehensive projection of future business processes, enterprises make mistakes at the beginning, which leads to overpayment in the future.
It is of high priority to find the appropriate integration system which offers flexibility to support the changes and upgrades your business will undergo as all this can have a significant impact on data processing. That’s why custom-made solutions offered by development teams require more budget for building and are not so adapted to upgrades and extensions. In order not to pay for multiple on-off integrations, your discretion and strategic mindset are paramount.
4. Elaborate Proper Infrastructure
Large organizations have multiple data sources that need synchronization to simplify business processes. Data integration helps configure and manage all the replication operations throughout the environment thanks to a centralized logical view. To make your multiple systems synchronized, you need to build data integration architecture that has to be elaborated in a way to maintain consistent data. For this purpose, it is important to differentiate primary architectures from secondary ones.
• Primary systems play a significant role in running core business processes.
• Secondary systems enrich the data in your primary systems.
Let’s have a look at the example of primary systems integration between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics ERP:
There are two scenarios while building data integration architecture. The first one consists in streamlined processes, avoiding double data entries, and complete visibility. You can achieve all this by setting up an architecture that connects numerous primary systems. To keep your data maintained and increase consistency in data handling, you might also want to make integrations with the secondary systems.
As opposed to the abovementioned type of architecture, with “spidernet” architecture, you will get excessive data channels which are harder and more expensive to maintain.
