Like many things, technology and technology-based solutions tend to go in cycles. Lately, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to best-of-breed solutions to address a myriad of business issues. This reverses a cycle where many CIOs chose to use ubiquitous ERP systems to address most of their business processes. While these systems can be powerful and offer significant value, they can also fall short, leaving gaps in processing areas. In this blog post, we will discuss reasons to utilize best-of-breed solutions within your organization’s back office.
Faced with these gaps, organizations either pay for expensive customizations or look to platform partners for complementary solutions. While the large ERP vendors have many “certified” partner solutions in their ecosystems, the business side of their customer base often finds that these partner offerings are not always best-of-breed.
Best of Breed Benefits
When addressing targeted, business, or industry-unique processes, companies are beginning to look beyond their ERP supplier for best-of-breed solutions. Best-of-breed technology refers to a strategy where organizations select the top-performing solutions for specific tasks or functions. The alternative to this is opting for a single, comprehensive suite from a single vendor. This approach allows businesses to maximize efficiency and innovation by utilizing the most advanced tools available in the market. By combining specialized solutions from various providers, organizations can create a customized technology stack that aligns perfectly with their unique needs and goals.
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 the areas in the financial back-office that have very targeted and configurable solutions include vendor portals, vendor onboarding, AP automation, data capture, workflow management, dynamic discounting, PO dispatch & update, and vendor management. By adding best-of-breed solutions in these targeted solution areas, companies can integrate very powerful and configurable solutions into their back-end ERP or legacy systems.
Bolt-Ons
Bolt-ons are solutions that add functionality to core technology, for example, an ERP. This technology fills the gaps left by rigid systems. They are often best-of-breed because they can specialize in one specific area, instead of having to be all-encompassing technology.
Get Started
ICG offers a suite of cloud-hosted business process solutions that can fill functionality gaps without needing ERP customizations. 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 need more reasons to utilize best-of-breed solutions to complement 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.