Integration Challenges Lead to Half-Million Dollar a Year Losses

That’s according to a new Cleo survey that gave IT decision-makers across industries an outlet to share their pressing integration challenges, their IT needs, and any barriers to achieving their business goals.

The consensus from survey respondents was that many of their integration solutions – the bulk of which are homegrown or heavily customized – are costly to maintain, require specific skill sets, and are prone to errors. Respondents noted that such cumbersome integration processes lead to a lack of reliability and business agility, which jeopardizes current B2B relationships – as well as new revenue opportunities.

Nearly all the companies surveyed (95 percent) maintain ecosystem integration aspirations – connecting all B2B and applicational data flows for comprehensive business visibility – but 38 percent lack the confidence in their ability to scale to support those goals. And while modernization is a dream for many (nearly half), those respondents also admitted that their IT infrastructure’s inability to bring on new applications and technologies is the biggest hurdle.

Additional insights into the kinds of integration problems these companies – and so many others – face in today’s digital business landscape include:

Partner and application onboarding processes are cumbersome:

• 63 percent said new-business onboarding takes too long because of customized partner requirements.
• 25 percent of companies struggle integrating new applications, including cloud and SaaS solutions, without disruption.

IT modernization can help achieve targeted business growth:

• 48 percent of organizations want to modernize to better compete in today’s digital business landscape but admit that modernization is one of the enterprise’s biggest challenges.
• 81 percent believe replacing legacy systems will play a role in supporting emerging business initiatives, which include optimizing order-to-cash processes.
• 47 percent reported an increasing need to integrate with SaaS applications to meet new business demands.

Poor integration takes a costly toll:

• 57 percent of respondents reported losing up to $500,000 of annual revenue due to poor integrations, with 4 percent reportedly losing up to $1,000,000 every year.
• 66 percent said they lose between 50 and 500 orders annually due to manual workflows.
• 22 percent reported significant delays in generating revenue due to slow onboarding processes of new customers and trading partners.

Comprehensive data integration is a goal:

• 60 percent see end-to-end data visibility as an important requirement to managing their digital ecosystem.
• 46 percent said process automation is critically important and 25 percent believe accelerating end-to-end data flows between internal and partner applications will drive significant business value.

They understand what it will take to do business better:

• 79 percent said consolidating disparate technologies will directly support emerging business initiatives.
• 68 percent said automating data transaction processes will improve business workflows.
• 38 percent said having visibility into end-to-end data flows will help proactively manage the business.

Additional integration help may be needed:

• 29 percent lack the skilled resources to build and manage integrations between systems, applications, and partner ecosystems.
• 43 percent said a managed integration solution would help fill internal expertise and resource gaps.

Ultimately, the survey respondents understand the limitations of legacy B2B technologies and that supporting new and emerging digital patterns requires cutting ties with outdated integration solutions in favor of ones that enable the end-to-end B2B, cloud, and application integration use cases they require. That mindset is especially critical given that 90 percent said they plan to migrate core integration capabilities to the cloud within a year.