Top 4 Data Integration Challenges For MSMEs – And How To Overcome Them

Indian mid-market companies are betting on the power of digital transformation to achieve efficiency and business resiliency. These companies are eager to upgrade legacy systems and processes and adopt modern business practices to become key players in India’s journey to a $5 trillion economy.

Against this background, MSMEs can use data to make better business predictions, improve operational efficiency and ensure customer delight. While it’s important to broaden the number of sources from where data is gathered, it’s even more critical to integrate and unify this data across the organisation.

What is data integration?

Data integration refers to consolidating data from diverse sources for a single, unified view. . Effective integration enables smooth information sharing between connected systems. This is crucial both from an internal and external standpoint; it gives your employees access to the latest data, making them more productive. Additionally, business leaders can make smarter decisions based on real-time information. Meanwhile, customers have any-time, on-demand access to the information they need.

Top four data integration challenges for MSMEs:

1. Siloed data collection

Often, MSMEs store data acquired from various sources in different systems and formats, as they build their tech stack over the years.This can create data siloes, making it difficult for employees to where employees can find it difficult to track, access, and collect data, especially data that is maintained by other departments.

This dispersed and scattered data can lead to:

• Delays in getting the right information, leading to slower decision-making hence delays in data
• Entire datasets being ignored or rendered unusable for some teams
• Lack of a single view of data for efficient decision-making
• Erroneous or duplicate data

2. Customer movement across departments

A typical customer moves between enterprise functions such as marketing (while researching a product), sales (making a purchase), customer service (while resolving an issue), and so on. Since each department has different benchmarks for measuring customer success, their data needs are also varied. To make sense of all that data, organisations will need to collect customer data from each department, clean, update and merge it to ensure an SSOT of each customer is accessible to all. Without the right tools, this can be a time-consuming and frustrating task.

3. Adding new standalone applications instead of a unified platform

Most MSMEs end up with a patchwork of data sources and applications. A typical mid-market company is believed to use300–500different applications. When different teams use and maintain these applications, there is a high chance that each team will follow its own procedures for capturing and updating data. They might even add unorganised data from other applications or in different formats, making data integration and management difficult.

4. Lack of trained employees to maintain data discipline

Process efficiency is a critical factor in every business. In MSMEs that have small and resource-constrained teams, it can often take a lot of effort to introduce company-wide protocols for data entry and management. Let alone, keeping the employees updated on appropriate data discipline.

Why data integration is crucial for MSME companies;

Data integration solutions help cut costs and reduce complexity by consolidating and simplifying huge datasets without disrupting the entire work ecosystem. An intelligent data integration solution can connect your on-premise and cloud-based systems and bring all the data contained within them onto a unified platform. So

1. Employees have access to a single view of data and a single source of customer truth, letting them serve customers better and faster
2. Leaders can plan, organise, and rapidly execute existing and future operations, reducing time-to-market.
3. MSMEs that have already made numerous investments in different tools and systems to streamline day-to-day operations don’t have to again spend on a complete IT overhaul to consolidate data on a single platform

How Mulesoft can help

Mulesoft helps connect all data — making it easy to connect any application, data, and device with APIs. MuleSoft makes it easy to integrate data to deliver a single view of the customer, automate business processes, and build connected experiences, faster. With up to 27% faster process automation, Mulesoft helps unlock real-time data with Genie Data Cloud, giving more value with all your systems and data together.

Mulesoft:

• Allows users to easily clean up data, ensures data accuracy, and eliminates duplication
• Enables creation of APIs that can be connected to any system, document, application, and data source
• Makes it easier to retrieve real-time data across systems, either in the cloud or on-premises, and produce a unified customer view on a single platform.

Read more about amping up your approach to data integration with Mulesoft

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