How many types of software are you using?

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Brad: Hi, my name's Brad. This is my partner, David. Today I'd like to address a topic I hear about all the time. I just taught three classes and every class complained about we have so many different pieces of software that don't talk to one another. What do you see going on here and how do you play with that?
David: You know, the industry has grown up this way a lot. There's never been a really good piece of software to cover everything and so we use every other good piece of software to do a number of different functions inside the company and most of them don't talk to each other.
Brad: Got it.
David: And so it's not that the pieces of software are bad, they're just doing something that doesn't connect to the other one. The biggest issue that all of these different pieces of software, the problem that it creates, is that you can't get good information about what's going on in the company across different functions of the business, and so there's just Excel hell going on all over the place trying to marry information together and figure out what's going on.
Brad: Well, and I also see just two, three people having to retype the same information.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Brad: So it's got to be a productivity drain.
David: It is, and if you think about it, just to put it in your head, the way to think about it is even if it takes somebody like 5 or 10 minutes to do something and it takes somebody else 5 or 10 minutes to do something and it takes three or four of those people 5 or 10 minutes to do something and you multiply that by the number of customers and number of times, times what we're paying for them, it truly is thousands of dollars of wasted time.
Brad: Right, because I hear often times, well, new software systems are too expensive, and, I mean, what you're just saying is it costs you too much to use the one you've got.
David: Well, you know, the thing is is that when you consider investing in a new piece of software, you really do have to do a cost analysis of that, and we were doing this with a company not too long ago and we found that the CFO was actually spending about a day and a half a week making Excel spreadsheets. They were the most beautiful I've seen on the planet. They were really good and the information was great, but it cost them so much money for him to be doing that. So it was at least, you could now see how it might be easy to invest in something that pulled all of that information together.
Brad: So what would you recommend to a company even thinking about thinking about?
David: Well, I think just the first thing is, like, you've got to do a cost/benefit analysis and we can help you do that. We have several tools to help you do that, and that's just the place to start.
Brad: Okay, but do they have to be ready for it, also?
David: You certainly do, and sometimes they're not, and the cost/benefit analysis will help understand the cost, but you also have to understand the processes that it's going to change in your company as you lay a template over the top of your old processes. So there's a good bit of thought process that needs to go into doing that.
Brad: Right. So just don't go buy something because you need to buy it.
David: No, not yet.
Brad: Okay. Come talk to us if you're looking to invest in new software.