How Apps are Revolutionizing the Corporate World

Enterprise applications have transformed the way we do business. The proliferation of the internet, cloud, and big data into corporate environments has come to encompass everything from routine to complex business processes, and made it possible for larger organizations to adapt them across every corporate facet. This just goes to show how enterprise apps have infiltrated the workplace and in the process, revolutionized corporate processes from simple record keeping to complex, yet highly intuitive platforms. This includes the following:

1 – Business Intelligence (BI)

Business Intelligence tools are used to aid decision making and have been around for quite a while. But while they did help businesses streamline certain business processes, their exclusivity and a lack of intuitive functionalities left much to be desired. For example:

• Their use was limited to trained analysts, IT departments and board level executives.
• Reports often took a long time to generate and were outdated as soon as issued.
• Task completion took longer.
• There was a lack of accountability and transparency in business processes.

To acknowledge these factors, the BI platforms of today have transformed into tools that focus on self service and enable businesses to leverage a data driven approach to business intelligence. As a result, they:

• Are intuitive enough for users from executives to management to understand and useful enough for efficient task management.
• Have real-time reports for decision makers so that they have latest reports at any point of time.
• Allow users to assign tasks to people within complex corporate hierarchies to ensure individual accountability and complete transparency during their execution.
• Have interactive features (like built in chat modules) which allow managers and coworkers to adopt a more collaborative approach regarding tasks.

The BI applications of today not only provide important reports to make more informed decisions, but they also help in optimizing decision making and improving processes. Learn more about, why organizations need a highly scalable and custom BI Application.

2 – Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM applications are designed to manage customer interactions, customer data, automate sales, customer support and marketing, and manage vendor and employee relationships across an enterprise. But before the standalone software we know today, CRM tools were:

• One dimensional platforms where customer information was organized only to make it easily accessible, and nothing else.
• Lacking readily available information such as access to contact information when outside the workplace, which made following leads a challenge.

Today’s CRM applications go beyond customer databases and are programmed to consider certain factors (like organizational hierarchy) to drive workflow. It requires versatile technologies to bring a CRM to a mobile workforce while facilitating important processes, such as document sharing. As an example, take CRM applications that:

• Can be customized to drive whole or specific business processes.
• Facilitate the workflow management and approvals of the sales team based on the organizational hierarchy.
• Utilize mobile technologies where co-workers can access important information regarding leads at their fingertips.
• Display current status of leads in the sales pipeline. A tailor made CRM application we developed for one of our clients, incorporates optimizations like sales forecast and funnel views on active leads and opportunities.

3 – Human Resource Management (HRM)

Human Resource Management is about managing an organization’s employees. It has often been trapped with time consuming duties and paperwork which lead to unresolved issues and communication gaps that can have a ripple effect across an organization. And the larger the organization, the bigger the problems:

• Approval workflow processes involve several steps, adhere to specific requirements and are time consuming.
• Inefficient communication practices often result in lost insights into pressing issues that go unresolved and lead to bigger problems. For example, communication vehicles (like newsletters and pamphlets) may become insufficient in getting a company’s message across effectively on time.

By keeping employees and administrative staff connected on a single feature-rich platform, HR management applications can keep employees engaged and more informed across an organization no matter the scale. In this way:

• Staff can be updated on new workflow processes and company’s policy change, with live chat sessions and memos instead of long forwarded email threads.
• Approval processes (such as leave requests and equipment acquisition) can be automated and the time to process them, cut in half.
• Open channels of communication can enable employees to express concerns or insights related to clients, workflow challenges on the field and other corporate issues. In an HR Management application we developed recently, the “Observations” module provides management and team members open channels of communication to discuss such problems.

Wrapping Up

The year 2016 is coming to a close. And it has been a pretty eventful one for us at Cygnis Media. During the past few years, enterprise software have evolved from static platforms to robust feature rich tools that acknowledge latest mobile friendly technologies and adopt a data driven approach to drive crucial business processes. And we have grown with it. We have evolved to a company that clients trust to develop highly functional and complex business applications.

Have a project which you would like to discuss? Get in touch with us!