Over the years the process of electronic device transformation has improved day-to-day which demonstrates a constant implementation of modern facilities of technology and communication inside the knowledge-based society. Integration of enterprise software into business management is an outcome of knowledge-based economy demands and sequel of labor needs as a key advantage for modern business.
By the same token, the call for sophisticated software that combines financial, book-keeping, project management, operations and other workflow processes turned out to be increasingly critical. Thus, the largest companies, along with small and medium-sized businesses began to use enterprise software to be more efficient in diverse areas of their work and comply with trends in modern information systems as well.
What is Enterprise Software?
Enterprise software is a tool specifically designed to carry out corporate activities and obtain the results that different companies may need. Enterprise software definition is very general, as one business software can differ radically from another, so, based on the concept, this is the best way to broadly define what is enterprise software.
The concept of enterprise software indicates the use of technology to automate multiple tasks and make the processes that are performed manually more effective with the relevant software tools, subtracting human error, accelerating completion times, and allowing the workforce to focus on tasks that add more value to the business's performance and can be automated.
According to the American Production and Inventory Control Society, “Enterprise software is a framework for planning all of the resources of a business, from strategic planning through execution.” It has been designed to abide by the demands and requirements of a specific organization to promote strategic and concurrent advances for more competent management.
Key Features of Enterprise Software
Even though the enterprise software system is enough wide term and differs depending on its objectives, they all have some common features:
The software must have an affordable design so that all the users involved know how to handle it without great complexities and provide them with a pleasant management experience to generate growth and learning that is not only reflected in the processes but also given the human factor of the companies.
Modern business management software stands out for using the cloud as a storage medium, which allows access to tools and data from anywhere, at any time using any type of device. Cloud is not the only option defining the enterprise software, but the idea of having access to your data and digital working space from wherever you are is the key aspect here.
Enterprise software system drives the growth of companies and keeps them in constant evolution to respond to the changes and challenges faced by each sector, it adapts to the needs that arise internally in any company and progresses at the same time. Enterprises aim to be flexible in everything they do, and the scalability of their business software is one of the Atlanteans holding the operations.
All enterprises tend to use multiple solutions on a daily basis, and it is crucial to have all these tools synchronized in a convenient and seamless way, in order to have all the data sources connected, enable continuous business processes, unify all business metrics, etc. Examples of enterprise software
of such could be ServiceNow Jira integration or Confluence Microsoft integration.Knowing the importance of this, major enterprise software solutions offer multiple built-in integrations, as well as there are third parties specialized in such connections. We at Alpha Serve, for example, offer BI connectors that enable Power BI Jira integration and Tableau Jira integration, Power BI ServiceNow integration, Monday Power BI integration and many others.
Enterprise Software Types and Examples
Thousands of companies seek to respond to the countless requirements of customers and to satisfy all of them, carry out endless daily activities that have benefited from the use of enterprise software solutions, insofar as it is currently an essential resource to improve processes and results.
As part of technological advances, enterprise software has been designed to help solve particular activities within a company. There are the next up-to-date enterprise software types:
Enterprise Asset Management Software (EAM)
Enterprise Asset Management Software (EAM) helps to plan, optimize, execute, and track the necessary activities, priorities, skills, materials, tools, and information that are associated with an asset.
Enterprise Resource Planning Software (ERP)
Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that specializes in customer administration and loyalty, its basic operation focuses on creating databases to track each customer to provide a personalized experience from start to finish of the sales cycle and beyond.The most popular enterprise examples of CRM include Zoho, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
Enterprise Project Management Software (EPM)
Enterprise Project Management (EPM) helps to streamline business performance, that is split projects into stages, provide task management and its allocation to employees, and arrange meeting planning. Other important parts of EPM are communication and documentation management, reporting and data-mining provision, all information and entries handling about the project that supply coherence team-work. Its core is focused on improving those processes that allow companies to analyze, plan and manage the company.Jira, Asana and Monday.com are the cream of the crop of enterprise software solutions for project management.
Human Resource Management Software (HRM)
Human Resources Management (HRM) is a digital solution designed to cover, automate and integrate such tasks as personnel selection, training, welfare, and payroll. With HRM software, operational tasks are reduced, settlement processes are simplified, payroll payments are in-time, each process is automated and thus effectiveness is improved by adhering to the strategic objectives of the company.Rippling, Oracle HCM Cloud, and Keka are high-ranking examples of HRM.
Business Intelligence Software (BI)
Business Intelligence (BI) is offering collaborative tools for the performance measurement of a company. BI enterprise applications software is aimed at analyzing the information that is collected in a company to automate it, transform and visualize and then use it for the benefit of the business as a basis for making timely and correct decisions.Power BI, Tableau, Oracle Analytics, SAP Analytics Cloud are the main BI tools to analyze and report required databases for Enterprise.
Payroll Management Software
Payroll services for companies allude to payroll management and all that has a direct impact on workforce motivation and productivity. It includes everything related to the payment of the payroll, that is, its calculation, registration, etc., as well as the sum of taxes and social contributions.The best payroll software solutions for businesses are Gust and QuickBooks.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
PLM software is used for the development of new products or the improvement of existing ones, and they allow for managing changes during the manufacturing process, defining workflows or approving/rejecting advances, and storing all the information in the same support.Oracle Agile, ClickU, and Aras PLM are one of those important PLM software tools that facilitate businesses to handle a product’s lifecycle from top to bottom.
Supply Chain Management (SCM)
The concept of Supply Chain Management (SCM) is based on the management of the flow of goods and services and includes all the processes that transform raw materials into final products, or ensures the complex way of the product to the final customer. It involves the active optimization of a company's supply activities to maximize customer value and gain a competitive advantage in the market.It’s worth highlighting SAP SCM, Microsoft Dynamics 365 SCM, and Oracle NetSuite SCM as main examples of SCM software solutions.
Enterprise Content Management Software (CMS)
Content Management System (CMS) is software that uses databases to create, publish and manage oodles of content on web pages. It is about improving the management of information and converting paper-based data into electronic format, which leads to comprehensive management of it. It refers to all the structured and unstructured data that a company handles daily (databases and documents, purchase orders and emails, accounts and contracts, etc.), but also includes web content management, records management, and digital files or workflow management.PaperSave, IBM Enterprise Content Management, and Ascend Software are very few of the CMS high-tech tools to select from.
Marketing Automation Software
Marketing Automation aims to connect all marketing activities into a single system, maintaining personalized contact with the client based on the immediate and progressive response, to achieve a final conversion through software that will adapt the content and automatic actions to the data we already have.
HubSpot and
Salesforce Marketing Cloud are important enterprise software examples of marketing automation that help increase work performance.
5 Steps to Choose the Right Enterprise Software
A high number of companies want to find out what is the best enterprise software solution. It depends on the needs of the business, its processes and the infrastructure that the company already has. To help you, we have listed some important steps on how to choose the right enterprise software.
Step 1: Analyze Business Needs
First of all, it is important to clear up the needs of the business and make an in-depth evaluation of the departments, processes, and workflows which you need to digitize with the software. Find existing bottlenecks, draw up possibilities and think about how enterprise application software can help you.
Step 2: Check the Structure of Required Software
The system must also adapt to the physical infrastructure that your business has, otherwise you need to include the new infrastructure to the software implementation project scope to make it fully comply with the newly-built system.
When additional enterprise software solutions are needed, it is essential to consult with the software vendor about how the problem can be resolved. A modern and cloud-based system can help a lot as it can be accessed from different devices and in different locations.
Step 3: Evaluate the Scalability of the Enterprise Software Solutions
Does the management software have the ability to grow with the business? The system must have robust technology and be able to continuously optimize processes, with full control and visibility, but with greater operational scale. How many servers are used and will be needed in 3-5 years? What is the current user tier and the planned one?
Enterprise companies are known by their long-term strategies and planning, thus it is important to foresee the scalability request for the software considered.
Step 4: Check On Integration Possibilities
It is very important to understand what functions are integrated within the chosen platform and how it interacts with other platforms that the business already has. Efficient communication between management tools and business processes is crucial to guarantee the agility of these processes and allow the creation of an end-to-end vision. Due to in-depth data analysis with its actionable insights that software integrations provide, businesses may improve their efficiency and manage to make better profit.
Step 5: Choose Systems with Real-Time Updating
In addition, always opt for agile systems that update the data in real-time, as a result you have access to actual data that allows you to choose the correct tactical decisions in order to make timely solutions for further business development.When selecting a tool for your data analysis, consider choosing one that supports incremental refresh for efficient data management. With this feature, only new or modified data is retrieved, reducing the amount of time and resources required for data synchronization. By choosing a Power BI Connector for ServiceNow with incremental refresh support, you can make more informed decisions in real-time to drive your business forward.
Summing Up
Enterprise software not only provides the ability to effectively achieve business results but also helps employees to do efficient work in a limited time. Minimize the frequency of errors and get the monotonous work done so the rest of the team can focus on creativity and bring new ideas to the company.
The ease of integration of enterprise application software allows the exchange of information with other systems, making the transfer of data much more efficient to collect information without wasting time. This helps bring collaboration to a new level, especially for the remote or distributed teams.
Thus, the company can respond quickly to business demands, centralize information and act with a focus on strategies and innovations.
