Types of Enterprise Software: Things to Know

Enterprise software development companies are now implementing automation software to lighten the cumbersome burden of repetitive tasks they do for the startup workforce. However, the recognition of automation is changing the face of the IT industry. When we talk about technology, it is sometimes overwhelming to keep on top of new terminology and trends.

Enterprise application software (EAS) is a term that we hear often, though it isn’t always easily defined. In general, EAS is large-scale software that aims to support or solve the problems of an entire organization especially if it’s a startup. This large-scale software allows for various different user roles and the roles define the actions a specific user can perform.

What is Enterprise Software?

The definition of enterprise software is that it caters to the needs of large organizations like businesses, schools, institutes, and government agencies. Different applications and software that aid organizations in multiple operations aspects are covered under it.

Utilizing enterprise software, you can optimize and automate your business procedures, manage your data plus content, work together across the company structure, and conduct detailed analysis of gathered information. Large organizations rely on it to effectively run their day-to-day operations and strategy since it provides the technology infrastructure.

Some key capabilities of enterprise management software include:

• Operations and data need to be centralized throughout the entire organization.
• Standardizing processes
• Collaboration among employees, teams, and departments
• Providing analytics and business intelligence
• Integrating systems and information flows
• Ensuring security, privacy, and compliance

Unlike consumer software, which aids personal use, enterprise software supports many concurrent users and manages larger data sets and complex workflows. It also necessitates more comprehensive application training and aid; you may further read a software development guide to understand and know about the entire SDLC.

Why is Enterprise Software Important?

There are several reasons why enterprise software is crucial for large organizations.

Efficiency and Productivity

Enterprise software enables organizations to optimize workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and streamline operations. This boosts efficiency, productivity, and accuracy across the organization. Employees can focus on higher-value work rather than manual, repetitive, error-prone tasks.

Data and Integration

By centralizing data and systems, enterprise software systems eliminate information silos. This provides a single source of truth, real-time visibility into operations, and integrated data flows. Insights can be gleaned from correlating data across departments.

Collaboration

Enterprise software application management solutions facilitate communication, task management, and collaboration across the organization. Employees can easily share information and work together on projects regardless of location or department. This breaks down barriers and silos.

Analytics and Reporting

Enterprise software’s data consolidation and business intelligence capabilities enable in-depth reporting and analytics. Organizations can identify opportunities, trends, and areas needing improvement. Moreover, Better decisions can be made based on real-time data.

Agility and Scale

Enterprise software solution allows large organizations to respond to changes and scale operations quickly. New workflows, processes, and applications can be deployed rapidly across the organization. This provides the agility needed to adapt to a dynamic business environment.

Security

Enterprise software protects sensitive company and customer data through robust security measures like role-based access, encryption, and integration with identity management systems. This is essential for maintaining compliance, privacy, and trust.

Key Benefits of Enterprise Application Integration

Enterprise software plays a significant role in the success of your business’s digital transformation strategy. More specifically, enterprise application software is used in several different operations to streamline communication, enhance workflow and save time, making them different from typical B2C applications.

However, there are other benefits of implementing EAS, including:

Consistency and Quality: All operations are performed uniformly, creating consistent results ensuring the same outcome each time.

Metric availability: Uses real-time data from different operations collecting and generating reports and analyses to monitor key performance indicators(KPIs).

Operational efficiency: With reduced time, effort and labor costs needed to complete typical standard procedures, operational efficiency is remarkably increased.

Reduced labor costs: Manually performing tasks that lead to human errors and require additional expenses to reconcile discrepancies are eliminated.

Customization: Enterprise software systems are often carefully curated keeping in mind your business processes and specific needs.

Scalability and extensibility: Enterprise application software system tends to grow along with your business.

High security: EASs are facilitated with various layers of security such as encryption, multiple user roles and two-factor authentication.

Top 12 + Enterprise Software Solutions Every Business Needs

Establishing an enterprise requires a multi-dimensional approach. As an entrepreneur, you need to keep several accounts in mind to start up an ever-lasting business.

To stand steady in the market, here is our list of the best enterprise software types:

• Knowledge Management
• Content Management Systems (CMSs)
• Project Management
• Business Process Management (BPM)
• Enterprise resource planning
• Customer relationships management
• Business intelligence
• Supply chain management
• Human resource management
• Marketing automation
• Business process management and automation
• Enterprise resource planning

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management software helps organizations capture, organize, share, and use company knowledge, expertise, and information. Such type of enterprise software features include expertise location, document management, collaboration, workflow, search, and more. Major knowledge management tools are Bloomfire, Guru, Panviva, and ProProfs.

Content Management Systems (CMSs)

This is a major type of enterprise system. CMS software allows organizations to create, edit, organize, share, and publish content. This includes documents, web pages, digital assets, and more. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Adobe Experience Manager are major CMS platforms.

Project Management

These enterprise software tools assist with planning projects, tracking progress, allocating resources, collaborating across teams, and optimizing workflows. Leading enterprise software solutions for project management include Asana, Trello, Smartsheet, and Monday.com.

Business Process Management (BPM)

This is also one of the important types of enterprise application software. BPM software models automate and improve business workflows and processes. This increases efficiency, ensures consistency, and streamlines operations. Top business process management tools include Pega, Appian, Nintex, and IBM Business Process Manager.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

EAM software helps enterprise-level organizations manage physical assets like buildings, equipment, and infrastructure throughout their lifecycle. Key capabilities of such type of enterprise software solutions include maintenance, inventory, work orders, procurement, and reporting. SAP EAM, IBM Maximo, and ServiceNow EAM are leaders.

While all such enterprise software are readily available on the market, it is worth noting that startups can separately build their software by contacting software development company with experienced developers. Such agencies understand the requirements of software development for startups and build customized enterprise software within budget and time frame.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

It is argued that Enterprise Resource Planning, also known as ERP is the most important development in information technology. An ERP system is a packaged business software system that enables a company to manage resources(financial, human, material, etc.) efficiently and effectively by providing an integrated solution for the organization.

It’s impossible to ignore the impact of ERP in today’s business world. As enterprise processes and data are corralled into ERP systems, businesses can align separate departments and improve workflows ensuring significant bottom-line savings and improving business insights from real-time information generated through reports.

When operation management in the business is taken into account, ERP systems are beneficial for your organization in several ways, mainly because they aim at improving the decision-making capability of the organization.

Some of the prime ERP functionalities are:

• Accounting
• Financing
• Marketing
• Planning
• Purchasing inventory
• Sales
• Inventory
• Order management

An effective ERP system provides a central repository for all information shared by diverse facets and thereby improving and managing the data flow across organizations. This provides a 360 ERP that can incorporate CRM, supply chain management, point of sale data, financial information, business intelligence, and much more.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Enterprise organizations have to manage large volumes of consumer data, with advanced CRM, enterprises can concentrate more on their customers and reduce the time on mundane tasks. If there’s any large software market capable of handling complex data in internal databases it’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It focuses on marketing and strengthening customer communications.

Some of the primary CRM functionalities are:

• Analytics
• Contact center automation
• Integration with other software
• Lead management
• Workflow automation
• Marketing communication
• Salesforce automation

CRM has developed over decades and will continue to evolve with new technological advances that enhance opportunities that businesses have to interact with customers.

Businesses will need to be prepared to adapt their CRM initiatives to meet new customer behavior in a dynamic market. There are several CRM trends on the horizon that businesses can anticipate such as mobility, integration of CRM into business processes and customer relationship experience.

Customers are bombarded with information, if businesses want to attract and more importantly retain customers, they need to make a lasting emotional impression. New CRM tools provide businesses with the information they need to understand customers and what kind of experience appeals to them.

Enterprise Business Intelligence Software

In today’s challenging business environment, BI is a technique and solution that helps business managers to understand business situations. One of the main characteristics of enterprise BI today is greater, all-encompassing insight into business operations and the individual contribution of business processes in the overall performance of the business.

Enterprise business intelligence is marked by its capability to integrate with diverse and dispersed sources of information throughout the organization.

Today’s BI is the organization’s recognition that the technology goes beyond a particular type of query, reporting or analytics tools typically delivering siloed information. BI is a comprehensive portfolio of technologies involving financial performance management, operational intelligence, transactional applications and data repositories.

Moreover, BI tools connected to Google Analytics provide exponentially greater intelligence for your marketing and sales leaders. The potential of this powerhouse to make better-informed decisions results in direct increases in ROI and sales. This level of insight creates a distinct competitive advantage for your business enterprise.

Business intelligence gives you an edge over competitors by integrating data mining, benchmarking and statistical algorithms to reveal patterns and deliver accurate results. These BI tools use graphs, charts, tables to make better decisions and help managers detect patterns and trends in complex data.

Supply chain management

Companies around the world are discovering a powerful new source of competitive advantage, it’s called supply chain management and it encompasses all of those integrated activities that bring a product to market and create satisfied customers. Successful supply chain management coordinates and integrates a steady flow of supplies necessary for continuous production and delivery.

These tools are essential for gathering and storing data about sales, orders, materials, asset management, procurement, warehouses, distribution as well as facilitating cooperation between all links of the supply chain. On the other hand, misconceptions between these supply chains can result in bad customer service and financial losses.

SCM has been widely recognized that actions taken by one member of the chain can influence the profitability of others in the chain. As the members of the supply chain streamline their own operations, the next opportunity for improvement and a prime source of competitive advantage is through better coordination with their customers and suppliers.

Thus, a well-coordinated and integrated supply chain management solution is needed to help manage the effective and efficient flow of information and funds across the entire supply chain, from suppliers to component producers to final assemblers to distributors and ultimately to the customer.

Human Resources Management Software (HRMS)

Human Resource Management (HRM) is the management function concerned with hiring, motivating and maintaining people in an organization. HRM is designing management systems to ensure that human talent is used efficiently and effectively to accomplish organizational goals.

As human resource management is one of the most essential sectors in any business, implementing human resource management software streamlines several clerical tasks.

The scope of HRM extends to all the decisions, strategies, principles, factors, practices, functions, activities and methods related to the management of people as employees in any type of organization.

HRM widely depends on document-driven manual processes that can be time-consuming and repetitive. HRM automation tool leverages actionable insights improves communication and collaboration, gives a positive employee experience, and reduces errors as well as processing costs.

American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) conducted a fairly exhaustive study in this field and identified nine broad areas of activities of HRM:

• Human resource planning
• Design of organization and job
• Training and development
• Selection and staffing
• Benefits and Compensation
• Union relations
• Personnel research and information system
• Employee assistance
• Organizational development

Human resource management tools usually fit business processes and fulfill their requirements in powerful semantic search, recruitment workflow automation, data management, custom task management and KPI dashboards.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is the application of computerized technologies to support marketers and marketing management in the achievement of their business-related objectives.

It becomes impossible to conduct all marketing activities manually when an enterprise reaches a certain size. You can neither personally reply to every message, post-real-time updates nor reply to every message. Marketing solutions segment your audiences and help you turn leads into loyal customers. Marketing automation can deliver several benefits. These include:

Enhanced marketing efficiency: The replication of marketing processes delivers greater control over costs. It enables enterprises to develop more streamlined and cost-efficient processes that can be operated by any marketing incumbent.

Greater marketing productivity: It allows marketers to employ Closed Loop Marketing (CLM). CLM is based on a plan-do-measure-learn cycle. Marketers plan a campaign, implement the plan, measure the outcomes, learn from them and subsequently modify the next event.

Improved customer experience: Customers receive personalized, relevant communications and offers at appropriate times. From the customers’ perspective, marketing automation means less spam.

Better responsiveness: It allows you to engage in real-time marketing, responding immediately to an identified opportunity. By building highly personalized marketing campaigns and automating communication via email, social media and scheduling messages ahead of time.

Marketing intelligence: Embedded analytics and reporting functionality provide valuable management insights into markets, customers, campaigns and so on, leading to enhanced efficiency.

Business Process Management and Automation

Instead of letting processes run without review, business process management analyses and monitors current processes to spot regions in which business process improvement can be applied. Business Process Management (BPM) takes place systematically and is geared towards achieving organizational goals.

Business processes are important to your business enterprise for many reasons including …

• Reducing errors and chaos within daily operations
• Achieving efficiency and standardization of procedures
• Ensuring accountability and defining approval processes
• Streamlining communication between and across departments
• Designing tasks that align with overall business goals

Every business consists of processes. Whether you’ve clearly mapped them out, automated them or conducted them manually, they are all around. From customer onboarding to recruiting, strategy, procurement and more, they exist in each department.

Automating business process management can transform your organization in the most positive ways by gaining transparency and achieving digital transformation.

How to choose enterprise software: buy vs build

If Shakespeare was an IT manager, the famous question ‘To be, or not to be’ would have been ‘To build or to buy. With a wide range of enterprise industries, it’s hard to come by two identical enterprises. Each organization has its own unique system and processes that have been up and running for years. This is the reason why enterprises are often left in a dilemma whether to build a custom solution around existing processes or adapt to a third-party enterprise tool.

It is generally a better idea to go for a custom-built system if available solutions cover less than 60% of your needs.

There’s a no-one-fits-all approach, as both choices have their benefits. Nonetheless, there is a well-tested way to find whether the existing solution meets your business requirements. The checkpoints below summarize the consequences and prospects of the build vs buy software approach.

Building software is beneficial for your business enterprise if:

• Software is going to give you a competitive advantage sustainably
• No other existing solution meets your business needs
• Endpoints of collecting data aren’t volatile and are prone to changes frequently
• You have enough resources to cover costs associated with maintaining and building software

Buying commercial software is beneficial for your business enterprise if:

• Building software won’t give you a competitive edge
• You are looking for a quick solution that deploys immediately
• The solution available addresses your business challenges
• Your resources are limited and you would rather invest them in core business activities

While all such enterprise software are readily available on the market, it is worth noting that startups can separately build their software by contacting software development company with experienced developers. Such agencies understand the requirements of software development for startups and build customized enterprise software within budget and time frame.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some different types of enterprise software?

The major enterprise IT tools categories include ERP, CRM, SCM, HCM, BI, HRMS, project/portfolio management, and CMS. Each serves different business functions but can integrate into a larger enterprise suite.

What is an enterprise software system?

An enterprise software system is a type of application that large organizations use to achieve their goals and run their operations efficiently. It encompasses programs for managing core business processes like accounting, HR, and supply chain as well as analytics, content management, and collaboration.

Why would you need enterprise software?

Enterprise business software allow large organizations to optimize productivity, speed, accuracy, and efficiency across departments. It enables consolidating data, automating workflows, collaborating across the company, gaining valuable insights through analytics, and scaling rapidly.