Quote-to-Cash system decentralized data is the point at which sales data, stock levels, invoicing, supplier, and client information are all maintained on different systems. This poses numerous threats to a business process performance and needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.
Data silos discourage businesses from looking inside. Employee engagement is difficult to assess and compare due to scattered and inadequate data, which prevents you from recognizing and rewarding your best employees. Data silos can also conceal increasing issues such as bad team culture until it is too late.
What caused data silos to exist in the first place?
Some of the reasons include employing outdated technologies or depending on apps that don’t operate (share information with each other) together. Maybe the organisation grew quicker than planned which resulted in tools and techniques being implemented to address burning issues within the business process. Originally it took control of the areas you hoped it would, but the problem is not to own portions of a process, but rather the whole process.
The point being having segregated data creates visibility problems that will stymie your control and management of daily activities. Five main problems are:
Data Silos limit management visibility to all process activities
Data silos prohibit essential information from being exchanged. Each department’s analysis is constrained by its own point of view. Without an enterprise-wide perspective of data, there is little possibility of uncovering enterprise-wide inefficiencies. If operations and cost data aren’t combined, how can you identify the hidden potential for operational cost savings?
Data Silos threaten data integrity
When data is siloed, the same information is frequently maintained in multiple databases, resulting in discrepancies between departments. Data can become less accurate and hence less helpful as it matures. For example, if mining data on the same mining operation is housed in many systems, the data may grow out of sync over time.
Difficulty optimizing resources in data silos
When the same information is kept in many locations, and users download it into their personal or group storage, resources are depleted. Streamlining data into a single source frees up valuable storage space and removes the IT burden from purchasing and maintaining storage that may not be required. For example, if several workers download data to analyze in a spreadsheet, each download is a duplicate of previously downloaded data.
Imagine sending Excel spreadsheets over email with multiple using and updating them. Each time it is sent it is duplicated. Each time it is updated it is duplicated. -to-Cash system decentralized data
Data silos discourage collaboration
Silos are formed by culture, and silos reinforce culture. Collaboration is being embraced by data-driven enterprises as a strong tool for discovering and using new insights. Departments require a mechanism to communicate data to foster teamwork. When it is difficult or impossible to communicate data, collaboration suffers.
Do you really know your customer?
How do you know and understand your customer if you do not have Insight into their buying patterns? How do you plan without proper client-related data? It’s difficult to acquire a genuine vision or knowledge of customer behaviors when you have divergent pieces of data. Or data silos around from multiple sources and in different formats.
The StreamBean360 approach to tearing down data silos for Q2C and P2P
Data silos reduce productivity, impede insights, and impede cooperation. However, when data is consolidated and streamlined for analysis, silos become obsolete. Cloud computing technology has been tuned to make centralization feasible.
Thousands of organizations worldwide choose to centralize data in the cloud to simplify data, data governance, security, and regulatory compliance while providing silo-busting access to data by every department.
Change Management
If business culture may lead to data silos, it is also the way to tearing them down. Communicate the advantages of data sharing and data integrity to employees so that they comprehend and anticipate the change. Also, convey the issues with silos, such as data quality issues and the necessity to remain competitive. Management must demonstrate commitment to culture transformation since it is a large endeavor.
Demonstrate the expected outcome to your team. Identify your process champions and make them early adopters who will help you train users going forward. Design KPIs for using the new and improved system to be implemented.
Get your data into StreamBean360
Once you have created your Team in StreamBean360.com they can start by creating customers, suppliers and products in the system. Use a Champion to plan and implement the data take-on process. Bulk importing of customer details is available in the system.
Set the correct numbering schemas you want to use for your document numbering i.e. quote, invoice and delivery note numbers to align with your existing numbering system.
Start using StreamBean360 immediately
As soon as you need to do a quote, do it in StreamBean360 to commence. This will cancel your quote to cash (Q2C) and procure-to-pay (P2P) data silos immediately and provide you with an overall view of all statuses of all process objects in your organisation.-to-Cash system decentralized data
Get in touch for more information.
For a full list of SB360 features, visit the Features page.