Dedicated business systems/core systems

Dedicated business systems/core systems

Depending on the type of industry you operate in and how you can best manage your core business, you may find it useful to have a dedicated business system. The term “dedicated business system” is pretty broad and covers tools that deal with logistics, case management, decision support, order management, etc. An industry-specific solution that is able to integrate with, for example, a payment terminal, Vipps and Altinn may be useful.

A good dedicated business system should help your employees to work more efficiently and to a higher standard.* A lot of these systems are also designed to comply with the standards, regulations and legislation that apply to your particular industry, supporting you in running a business in accordance with the right framework conditions.

Not everyone needs a dedicated business system to operate efficiently – for a lot of businesses it may be more than enough to have good tools for information management and planning, alongside a good finance and CRM system, like we’ll show you later on in the guide. However, if you operate in an industry where you do need such a system, there are plenty of industry-specific systems to choose from.

For businesses involved in production and logistics, the most effective solution may be an ERP system. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and encompasses a host of commercial activities. In addition to production and distribution, the system can deal with accounting, CRM (customer management) and SRM (supplier management), and so on.

If your business uses Microsoft’s Office 365 platform (O365), there are good opportunities for using the tools already featured in O365 for digitisation and efficiency purposes. Potential tools include, for example, Forms, Flow, Power Apps, SharePoint and Bookings, which can help you to digitise, streamline and automate your operation. If you already have O365 (as a core system), this will affect your choice of other systems.

You can build what you need using, for example, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365, but for most this is often too wide-ranging and expensive a solution and takes too long. It is often better to choose open platforms as a core system, which you can develop yourself, but which also have plug-ins that you can add. That way you avoid reinventing the wheel. One example of this is to use WordPress as a website platform, adding WooCommerce for e-commerce, and other modules as required. You can easily integrate WordPress with, for instance, Mailchimp to send out newsletters and communicate with your customers.

Here you can see examples of various dedicated business systems that can satisfy a variety of needs: https://poweroffice.no/utvidelser/fagsystemer/ (in Norwegian)

*Source: https://www.visma.no/consulting/tjenester/fagsystem/ (in Norwegian)