What is the cost of using outdated software?

All around the world, countless organisations use old, non-integrated, user-unfriendly and/or outdated software solutions to run their businesses. Unavoidably, this leads to inefficiencies in today’s fast changing world with demanding and impatient customers. If this is also relevant for your organisation, then this probably is not news to you. For sure you are aware of the availability of better solutions. But for some reason, you were not ready to act yet. While you are waiting, do you have any idea what the cost is of using those outdated software solutions?

In the western world, organisations modernise their ERP and CRM solutions every 8 to 10 years. That is either an upgrade or a complete replacement. In some industries, this number tends to increase due to the current crisis. But also due to the fact that many organisations postpone these projects – even if they actually have to act.

So why do companies postpone the modernisation of their business software in the first place? Well, there are various reasons! Varying from the questions who’s to blame that the old solutions doesn’t fit anymore. And looking up to the complexity and the effort of the replacement. To the fear of damaging individual curriculum vitae’s in case of project failure.

An important question is what the potential business impact of this delay is. While the list of consequences is a long one, we’ve selected a number of issues that can have a serious material impact on your business:

• Maintaining the current high Cost of Ownership (TCO) that unavoidably belongs to the deployment of on-premise software solutions based on your own server hardware and the internal system management
• The cost of your current poor or broken business processes will continue. And go up even further if you don’t fix it shortly. This can result in a decrease of customer and employee satisfaction. And eventually in the loss of customers and the departure of employees
• For your current manual processes, a delayed modernisation makes you dependent on the brains of your senior employees who will leave your company shortly when they retire
• Perhaps the most important issue: missing out on the ongoing innovation that we see in the cloud-based solutions these days. All leading ERP/CRM-vendors have moved their R&D investments to their cloud products. So if you still run on-premise solutions, this means that the availability of new functionality and innovation will slow down. And eventually stop.

Modernising your business software demands for a serious investment. But continuing the use of outdated solutions can potentially cost you’re a fortune!

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