Traditionally most businesses have run on a single piece of software that essentially did everything for them , from their finance to their sales and marketing . But , as time moved on and technology became more sophisticated , business software moved away from this monolithic model . Instead , today ’ s organisations are embracing best-of-breed solutions for each individual requirement of a business . Yet , businesses have ended up with siloed applications that don ’ t always talk to each other . Paul Cartwright , Technology & Innovation Director ERP at Node4 , explains how businesses can successfully consolidate their applications into a standard , robust solution , which is easily monitored , maintained and extended . on-premises hardware with dedicated servers , networking and firewalls .

Businesses have tended to stick with these monolithic solutions even if some modules did not perform as well as others . This compromise made sense in many instances because the alternative was to install third-party bolt-ons . Many of these needed their own servers and supporting infrastructure too , and specialist systems integrators were often required to ensure data flowed between the original ERP solution and the bolt-ons .

Yet , despite significant investment in time , money and resources , these efforts were often met with limited success . Sometimes , data still had to be transferred manually from one application to another . Indeed , this is why there are still organisations around today that copy and paste information from procurement spreadsheets to invoicing software .

28 www . intelligentcxo . com