Earlier this week I had my bi-annual visit to the dentist. I learned the hard way years ago when I put off going to the dentist for ten years and ended up making a sizable contribution to the new deck on his weekender at Whale Beach!
Thankfully the nett result of my most recent trip was a thorough clean and a tone talk about the importance of dental hygiene.
Anyway when I went to pay, the delightful receptionist, Sandy kept disappearing to a room behind the reception area. She left the counter three times during the payment transaction.
In the past their admin staff have been as sharp as a scalper at a sold out teenybopper concert so I asked Sandy about the hold up. She explained that their “computers had died” and their IT guy couldn’t come until later that day or, more likely, the following one.
I asked her if all their applications were stored locally (not my exact words, but you get my drift) to which she replied ‘Yes’.
They had no access to any client records, historical data or integrated payment faciility!
It got me thinking … how many businesses have this potential risk hanging over their business?
Plenty I’d reckon, including much larger businesses with more to lose than a suburban dentist. And when a major system failure happens in a bigger organisation it’s not the receptionist who is most inconvenienced, it’s the CFO and finance team working back until midnight to manually retrieve data and recreate reports or the warehouse/shipping manager sleeping under his or her desk after ensuring all orders have been manually cross checked and labels correctly handwritten. Not to mention the I.T. team, who are going to rack up some serious ‘time in lieu’ as well!
Imagine if you could have your critical business data ready to access at any time from anywhere in the world wherever you can access a web browser? If one of your machines dies, simply boot up another machine, get on-line and log-into your dedicated, secure account www.netsuite.com . Voila, you’re back in business with nothing lost but a minute or two of your time. You can even access it with your phone or tablet if need be!
If you’re becoming increasingly worried about the risk of ‘interruption’ hanging over your business, give us a call for a chat and we can explain how to permanently remove this threat! We can even show you an accurate ROI so you can see much the investment in Netsuite will benefit your business over the longer term. See more about the power of Cloud ERP at www.dwr.com.au or call us on 1800 197 403.
Food for thought hey! Just make sure you brush and floss afterwards!
