Are Your Work Safety and Crisis Management Solutions Fit for Purpose?

IT-driven software purchasing habits cost more than you think

Work safety and crisis risk – from the ongoing pandemic to natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and reputational threats – has never been higher. Yet, software purchasing habits, still dominated by IT preference for one-size-fits-all ERPs and CRMs over innovative, purpose-built SaaS solutions, haven’t evolved to meet the moment.

How bad is the issue?

In the latest, available analysis of software buyer preferences, Gartner reported that most purchasers continue to prefer known vendors; a paltry 13 per cent were open to any vendor with an interesting solution that met their needsⁱ.

In contrast, a staggering 22 per cent of buyers admitted that they would only consider approved or known vendors for new purchases; one in four would only consider approved or known vendors for replacement purchases.

Meanwhile, approximately two-thirds of buyers prefer approved or known vendors, either for new purchases (65 per cent) or replacements (63 per cent). 

If those raw numbers aren’t bad, the reasoning is even worse. So-called tech debt and sunk costs are motivating buyers to stay with what they know.

And what they know are ERP and CRM platforms. Typically procured by IT for service management, cumbersome Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management solutions are seeing their applicability stretched beyond recognition to fit the work safety and crisis management use case.

Meanwhile, business owners and senior leaders are being shunted to the side. There, they’re belatedly learning that their shoe-horned solutions cost far more than IT thinks.

Unfortunately, the issue is likely to get worse, as the capabilities gap between legacy solutions and fit-for purpose SaaS innovators continues to widen.

The digital innovation organizations are missing

Indeed, outside of the legacy ERP and CRM market, digital innovation is happening at a torrid pace, with the fields of work safety and crisis management, in particular, being deeply impacted. Many of the digital innovations have incorporated important lessons learned from the COVID crisis.

Gartner, for instance, has highlighted the overarching trends filtering into the work safety and crisis management software marketⁱⁱ. The three overarching trends, out on which ERP and CRM purchasers are missing, include:

• Interfaces and experiences. Technologies that are fundamentally changing the way we interact with the world.
• Business enablers. Technologies and trends that impact enterprises by changing practices, processes, methods, models, and/or functions.
• Productivity revolution. Technologies driven by the confluence of multiple technologies and trends, resulting in solutions that help organizations quickly, accurately, and, in greater volume, classify, predict, and solve problems that humans cannot.

As these trends have migrated into work safety and crisis management software, largely leaving legacy ERPs and CRMs behind, noteworthy has been the emergence of next-generation disruption management solutions for today’s work safety and crisis management challenges.

These innovative SaaS solutions offer clear advantages over legacy ERPs and CRMs:

• Purpose-built. Like specialized physical equipment and/or vehicles, these solutions have been designed for specific use cases, rather than one-size platforms stretched to fit all use cases which are more akin to generic machines (poorly) adopted to fit custom use cases.
  
  As a result, customers who purchase innovative SaaS products won’t have to compromise on functionality and usability – as their procured solution has been designed with specific customer problems foremost in mind.
  
  Besides getting a more streamlined user experience, customers also benefit from the fact that these solutions align closer to their desired business processes as well as standards in the field (More below).
  
  Specialization, in particular, means that customers can use these innovative solutions to target challenges more effectively, increasing productivity while ensuring better incident response. 
• Improved usability. These solutions boast clean user interfaces that scale seamlessly to provide a consistent, easy-to-use experience on any device. Flexible workflows, forms, wizards, and dashboards also make it simple to guide users through any business process. Rounding it all out is responsive, mobile-first design, with modern auto-scaling cloud architecture to meet demand. 
• Best-practices out of the box. Established from years of consolidated customer knowledge, these solutions also come with a library of solutions and templates, based on the latest ISO standards. Not just that, the solutions themselves are aligned with numerous best practices as well as international standards. 
• No-code customization. Rather than having to tailor business needs to the ERP solution, these innovative platforms are easy to configure, thanks to no-code customization.
  
  For those who have their own work safety and crisis management processes down pat, the platforms let you build out your own solutions easily, with drag-and-drop designers for data models, forms, screens and dashboards, workflows, charts, maps, and more. 
• For any risk or hazard. Risk, compliance, planning, and assurance tools ensure every aspect of work safety is covered.
  
  But these complete platforms don’t stop there; they offer integrated messaging, tasking, workflows, data analysis, and mapping, as well, for improved business enablement.
  
  The net-result is that customers can manage any type of safety and/or critical event risk, hazard, or incident in a single, integrated solution, whose component best-practice modules and parts are all fit for purpose.
• Easy integrations. Speaking of integrations, the genius of these solutions is that they also offer a full range of integration options that make it easy to connect and synchronize data and plug in customer systems, e.g., single-sign on, messaging, and mapping.
  
  Don’t want to ditch any of your existing platforms? You won’t have to. These solutions integrate with existing platforms easily. 
• Offering critical event management-as-a-Service. Fully cloud-based, the solutions don’t have to be installed. And as they’re architected for high availability, you don’t miss out on service when demand is high – as it so often is during a critical event. 

How the hidden costs of ERPs and CRMs add up fast

That’s not all. These innovative SaaS solutions bring overall costs ways down when you start factoring in the total cost of ERP and CRP ownership.

Here, total cost of ownership is the estimate of all company resources and expenses associated with purchasing, deploying, using, maintaining, changing, and retiring your ERP or CRM solution.

It’s not just the quoted vendor price. Total cost of ownership factors in direct as well as indirect expenses, in addition to intangible costs to which organizations can assign monetary value.

It’s in calculating the total cost of ownership that ERP and CRM buyers find themselves left paying outsized costs for un-fit-for-purpose, work safety and crisis management solutions.

Often, though, they don’t even know it, as many of the costs incurred are hidden.

Yet, those costs accumulate, nevertheless, raising the total cost of an ERP or CRM over its entire lifecycle to a much higher amount than procuring organizations anticipate or have budgeted for.

So, what are the hidden costs? Here are some of the hidden costs of ERPs and CRMs:

Extensive costs to start up. Even more to change.

A traditional frustration with deploying ERPs and CRMs is their lengthy implementation cycles. Cycles often take upwards of a year before users can finally deploy.

And those are for systems that already come with hefty price tags, without mentioning the development and deployment resources they pull from overburdened IT.

Start-up costs aren’t they only ones, though. Developers of these legacy solutions often take a “take it or leave it” approach to additional changes, too. As a result, customers can’t make necessary customizations to their legacy ERPs and CRMs without shelling out more time and money.

Some customers are even forced to onboard external development teams to tailor their legacy solutions to unique work safety and crisis management needs and risks. 

Unfortunately, as risks increase, those needs get more extensive – with sudden changes in legislation, regulation, user requirements, and business processes happening all the time. 

Procurers of legacy ERPs and CRMs are being left with the bill. The type of development and change management their ERPs and CRMs demand presents stark administrative challenges, too, particularly during safety incidents and other critical events. That’s when organizations can’  t afford to wait to change processes fast, following new facts on the ground.

A tax on users

Usability challenges impose a similarly high (hidden) cost. ERP and CRM users often complain that their platforms lack basic usability. They feel stiff, even painful.

Why does it matter? Well, research suggests that it’s not a specific feature set but great user experience that drives software adoption.

Conversely, poor user experience lowers adoption. And where there is adoption, it’s unwilling – use is grudging, users less willing to engage.

As a result, users come up with effortful workarounds (enter Shadow IT, Excel, Word, and emails), meaning work is duplicated, security is compromised, and investments are sunk further.

There’s also a steeper learning curve for new users – another hidden cost.

Due to the Great Resignationⁱⁱⁱ, new workers are cycling into work safety and crisis management operations.

These users will have to get up to speed on the new company’s legacy ERP or CRM. And here, poor user experience only makes the training lift that much harder, even if the staggering increase in safety incidents and critical events means these new users will need to be getting up to speed faster than ever. 

Yesterday’s best practices

There’s also the opportunity cost of lost innovation.

Companies often find themselves purchasing CRMs for IT service management, then stretching their applicability to fit under-budgeted work safety and crisis management operations.

The thinking is the deployment will save money; the same goes for modules by legacy vendors marketed to penetrate business buyers outside of IT.

The reality, however, is quite different; these purchases only increase lifetime ownership cost when compared to procuring fit-for-purpose disruption management solutions.

That’s because the latter offer access to the latest best practices, devised by communities of experts who’ve learned from the COVID experience and the generalized rise in critical safety events.

Without access to a comprehensive library of solutions, templates, and well-considered modules, ERP and CRM buyers only limit their organization’s base of knowledge, stymie their resilience goals, and increase the time needed to get up and running. 

Designed for and operated by IT

Many of these hidden costs can be explained by an honest analysis of ERPs and CRMs.

Within the limited confines of IT-centric incidents and disruptions, such as helpdesk support and troubleshooting procedures, ITSM-based solutions excel; they lay out clear processes and actions, through well-articulated workflows.

Outside of those narrow confines. Not so much.

ITSM solutions have nothing to say about the management of work safety and critical events that emerge outside of IT, e.g., workplace accidents, natural hazards, as well as reputational and physical security threats – even those non-IT incidents that eventually impinge on IT services.

Here, non-IT business owners are hit with the highest costs when using these legacy products developed specifically for IT operations.

Business owners outside of IT struggle to get the requisite coordination, visibility, and situational-awareness enhancing capabilities that they would get from innovative SaaS products.

The latter eliminate (hidden) operational costs for non-IT users by facilitating:

• Getting timely information to all stakeholders during an incident
• Providing a centralized location for critical information, such as impacts, responses, and key messages
• Going beyond routine IT systems-support to help the rest of the organization
• Following the flow of relevant information that’s scattered across emails, meetings, documents, calls, and chat
• Providing consistency in key-communications methods and content
• Coordinating between different business units and management levels
• Gaining situational awareness to manage natural hazards and other threats
• Enabling crisis and executive team collaboration
• Enabling the identification of affected workers and providing communications to reach them
• Providing consistent messaging to customers, investors, workers, and the wider community 

ERPs and CRMs Versus Next-generation Disruption Management: Where they stack up for work safety and crisis management

Conclusion

In close, the SaaS revolution was intended to empower business owners over IT. ERPs and CRMs, however, have tilted the balance back to stone-age IT at the increasingly high price of lost productivity, poor usability, and unpredictable pricing.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the business areas affected weren’t so critical. But work safety and crisis management are among the most important in this era of stark critical event management challenges.

And so, if you’re trying to boost organizational resilience, keep workers safe, and your business in compliance, it’s well past time to take back control of your destiny with next generation disruption management solutions, like Noggin.

These solutions won’t have you eating hidden costs that you can scarcely afford. Instead, they’re designed for your specific business challenges and processes. That helps you get up and running quickly with all the tools and information needed to stay ahead of disruption. 

Sources

i. Nick Ismail, Information Age: Gartner analysts explore digital transformation: the term and what it means by sector: Available at https://www.information-age.com/gartner-digital-transformation-123478351/.

ii. Tuong Nguyen, Gartner: 4 Impactful Technologies From the Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar for 2021. Available at https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/4-impactful-technologies-from-the-gartner-emerging-technologies-and-trends-impact-radar-for-2021.

iii. Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff, Business Insider: Americans are still saying ‘I quit’ in near-record numbers, showing that the Forever Resignation is
sticking around. Available at https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-quit-at-near-record-rate-great-resignation-forever-resignation-2022-6.