Why you should utilize best-of-breed solutions
Technology and technology based solutions, like many things, tend to go in cycles. Lately the pendulum seems to be swinging back to companies looking at “best-of-breed’ solutions to address a myriad of business issues. This seems to be reversing a cycle where many CIOs were choosing to go with ubiquitous ERP systems to address most of their business processes. While these system can be very powerful and offer a lot of value in certain areas, they can also come up short and leave large gaps in some processing areas.
Faced with these gaps, organizations find themselves either paying for very expensive customizations (expensive to implement, expensive to maintain and often a throw away if upgrading the ERP platform) or looking to the platform vendors partner community for complimentary solutions. While the large ERP vendors have lots of “certified” partner solutions in their ecosystem, the business side of their customer base was often finding that these partner offerings did not always represent best-of-breed.
When addressing targeted, and business or industry unique processes, companies are beginning to look beyond their ERP supplier for best-of-breed solutions. While the ERP remains the system of record and the central platform of their business process, best-of-breed solutions can bridge those functionality gaps that often go uncovered by the ERP’s out-of-the-box functionality. Some of these areas in the financial back-office that have very targeted and configurable solutions include: Vendor Portal ( Supplier Portal), Vendor Onboarding ( Supplier Onboarding), AP Automation, Data Capture, Workflow Management, Dynamic Discounting, PO Dispatch & Update and Vendor Management to name a few. By adding best-of-breed solutions in these targeted solution areas companies can integrate very powerful and configurable solutions to their back-end ERP or legacy systems.
ICG Consulting offers a suite of cloud hosted, business process solutions that can fill those functionality gaps without the need for expensive ERP customizations. And because these solutions are systems independent, if you change ERP platforms or add additional platforms through acquisition or technology upgrades, you do not need to rewrite or replace any of these solutions.
If you are wondering why you should utilize best-of-breed solutions to compliment your back-end systems and back-office processing, contact ICG and request a call or a demo of our comprehensive vendor portals or other powerful, cloud hosted solutions ICG Consulting can offer your company.