DOES YOUR IT MASTER PLAN PREPARE THE COMPANY OF TOMORROW?

IT master plan & connected information system

Connected IS, consistent information, a company ready for tomorrow, M-Files at the center: anticipate your next tools without recreating silos.

Galaxy Conseils • Companies & IT departments

Société Alpha has big plans for the next five years: opening two new sites, launching a subscription-based maintenance offer and acquiring a new ERP to manage production. Aïcha is working on her IT master plan with her team.

Taking inventory, she discovers a landscape that is already complicated. Sales management software, a customer relationship tool chosen by the sales rep, accounting software, email, and dozens of Excel files acting as bridges between all these tools. Each new tool was added to meet a need, with no overall plan.

If the new ERP is simply added to the list, it will become one more silo. Contracts will stay in one tool, invoices in another, interventions in a third. And the Excel files will keep multiplying to make the link.

Aïcha realizes that her master plan must not merely list tomorrow's tools. It must say how information will flow between them.

Tomorrow, even more tools

Every year brings its share of new needs: a new ERP, a customer portal, a mobile app, an e-signature solution, analytics tools. A master plan that merely stacks them up prepares an information system that is harder and harder to manage:

Think connections before tools

Preparing the company of tomorrow means planning now for a central point for information: an environment to which every tool, current or future, connects, instead of working in isolation. That way, the arrival of a new tool enriches the system instead of complicating it.

The same master plan, with M-Files at the center

Let's revisit Aïcha's story, this time with a master plan that puts M-Files at the center of the information system.

1. Assess. With Galaxy Conseils, Société Alpha lists its tools, the information they hold and the exchanges between them, including the Excel files that act as bridges.

2. Plan. The master plan designates M-Files as the central point for documents: contracts, invoices, intervention reports, customer files. Every future tool will have to connect to it.

3. Connect. The CRM, accounting and email are linked to M-Files. On screen, each one shows “Connected”.

4. Unify. A customer's documents are gathered around their record, whichever tool they come from. The Excel linking files gradually disappear.

5. Anticipate. When the new ERP arrives, it is connected to M-Files like the others. The system stays consistent: “connected and consistent IS”.

Two years later, Société Alpha has opened its new sites and launched its subscription offer. Every new tool found its place without creating a silo. And Aïcha runs a bigger company, but not a more complicated one.

Why M-Files is different

M-Files is designed to sit on top of other systems rather than replace them. Its connectors and application programming interfaces make it possible to link an ERP, a CRM, an accounting system or email, and to display their information in a shared view.

Because documents are organized by their information (customer, contract, project) and not by the tool that produced them, changing a tool does not call into question how information is organized.

Each connection remains a project to run with your IT teams. But it fits into an overall plan, instead of being one more makeshift fix.

And what about you?

Ask yourself this question:

“When your next software arrives, will you already know how its documents and data will join the rest of your information system?”

If the answer is no, your master plan may be preparing one more silo.