Businesses invest in a lot of things: infrastructure, product inventory, marketing, people, and so on. Before a businessman can significantly make money, he has to invest first in many things to get his business up and running as well as competitive. In the current technological age, information structure or IT is one of those key investments. Gone were the days when merely having papers and calculators were enough to get a business running. Today, every business, even the small ones, have computers and uses various softwares to help in their daily operational needs.
For small and mid-size range companies, investing in some decent information system is important but not nearly as urgent. The scenario is different from the big multi-national companies where information systems are deeply embedded in their operational procedures that they cannot do without it. For companies which are just starting up and whose operations are not nearly as big, simple softwares to help in their bookkeeping practices or inventory procedures are enough for them to get by.
Although it is ideal and wonderful to have all if not majority of a company’s business processes supported by tailor-made information systems, the cost of investing in such is too big a risk to make. For most start-up companies, the priority is to get the ground running, so to speak. The priority is to have the products sell first, to gain notoriety in the targeted market and to earn back their initial investment. Only then, when the business is up and running, when massive expansion plans have entered the picture, can the company actually consider investing in sophisticated information systems.
Of course there are some exception companies, I suppose, whose initial investment in information systems was what gave them the competitive edge to actually succeed and make it through in the industry they’ve chosen but this is more the exception than the rule.
The same can be said in our company. Even though it has existed for quite a while, the nature of business it is engaged in, requires not the sophisticated information systems, but rather just the simpler ones aided with skillfully made excel systems. Although there are some information systems in place, the cost the company incurred to acquire them has been fairly high. Not to mention that most of them are off-the-shelf products and not entirely tailor-made for us.
There have been proposals to develop an internal information system which would tie-up with the entire operational process thereby increasing efficiency and eliminating some of the hurdles being encountered currently, yet the costs are too staggering for the company to shoulder at this point. Hence, the company makes do with what little programs the IT section can churn up and with what ever excel system the skilled bookkeepers can come up with.
To say the least, this type of compromise has worked for quite a while. It has sustained the company thus far and it generates the results and reports needed to make the right decisions. It might be a painstaking process which everyone agrees will be easier had there been a more sophisticated system, yet that remains to be a dream yet to be fulfilled when the advantages will far outweigh the costs.
Related articles
- Why doesn’t everyone do Big Data? (econsultancy.com)
- SMEs to invest in new technology (xlntelecom.co.uk)
