We have all been passengers on the "Mega-Product Train." The journey is familiar: you identify a business problem, so you go shopping for a massive, off-the-shelf software platform. You spend months on RFPs and vendor evaluations. Once you buy it, you pay another year configuring it, only to realize you have to rewire your entire company’s processes just to fit the software’s rigid limitations.
It’s exhausting, expensive, and frankly, obsolete.
The era of monolithic software purchases is giving way to a far more agile, optimistic approach: selective workflow automation.
Instead of trying to swallow an elephant whole, consider the power of picking off your most painful, repetitive workflows—one by one—and automating them with precision using today’s advanced AI and low-code tooling. Think about solving a problem instead of buying a "solution".
Take something notoriously tedious like matching contracted rates against incoming invoices. In the old world, you’d buy an expensive finance module that forces a generic process on your team. In the new world, you build a targeted AI workflow that reads your specific contracts, scans invoices as they arrive, automatically flags variances based on your business rules, and even drafts an email to the vendor.
Consider Telecom Expense Management (TEM). Rather than buying a bloated TEM platform, you could use modern aggregators to reduce bill volume, then deploy intelligent automation to scan for anomalies and verify usage against plans.
The beauty of this approach is that it breathes new life into old processes. You don't have to rip and replace your current systems overnight. You can integrate where necessary, building intelligent bridges between silos.
Crucially, when you build these targeted workflows, you own the IP. The intelligence, the unique business logic, and the competitive advantage reside within your company, not rented from a vendor who might pivot tomorrow.
This strategy enables you to gradually offload expensive legacy systems when it makes sense. By strangling the old system workflow by workflow, you eventually realize you're paying a fortune for a mainframe that's only doing 10% of the work. That’s when you turn it off.
So, how do you start? Stop spending six months evaluating vendors. Spend six weeks building a Proof of Concept (POC) for one nagging problem. Don't look for a software salesperson; look for a partner team. Find the experts who can help you build these intelligent workflows and, critically, upskill your existing workforce along the way.
The future isn't about having the biggest software suite. It's about having the most agile and intelligent workflows—ones that you own, control, and continually improve every day.
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