Too many business tools? See How Automation Organizes Data

When tools multiply and the value of data decreases

In the SaaS world, many companies today use dozens of applications for their daily work. Marketing systems, CRMs, customer service tools, project management platforms and instant messaging (such as Slack) have become standard. The problem is that business processes are increasingly confined to single tools that do not exchange data with each other. As a result, each department works on a different piece of information, and the company loses a complete picture of the situation.

In theory, each new tool is designed to improve the work of your team. In practice, however, an excess of systems often has the opposite effect. When a company implements another tool for the sales department and expects salespeople to manually fill in the data simultaneously in CRM, in ClickUp and even in the client system, it very quickly turns out that only the number of clicks increases and the efficiency stands still or deteriorates. Employees spend more time moving data than working, which makes business processes unnecessarily long.

The fact that having the right tools alone will not improve the operational efficiency of companies can be seen on the example of marketing activities and working with data. Organizations build email bases in MailChimp or HubSpot over the years, but marketing efforts often stop at the point of collecting contacts. Why? Because data is distributed among different systems, and manually moving them, segmenting and preparing shipping is painstaking work. As a result, the potential hidden in the tools and data obtained remains largely untapped.

The data is there, but the decision is still missing

The biggest problem begins when data comes from various sources, but no one combines them and analyzes them as a whole to make business decisions.

The company knows it's unprofitable, but it can't pinpoint where the money is going. The finance department manually collects reports from different systems, each team works on a different dashboard, and the organization of data in the company practically does not exist.

Without a consistent flow of information in the company:

• marketing processes operate in isolation,
• sales automation is fragmentary,
• data analysis requires a large amount of manual work to collect information,
• marketing activities do not use the full potential of data (e.g. mailing databases or information about user behavior).

In the following paragraphs, we will describe how the implementation of automation and tool integration allows better data management in enterprises.

How automation helps to organize data in the company

Fortunately, information chaos in the company can be combated with the help of automation of business processes, which largely relies on the integration of tools in the company. As a result, companies gain unified automation systems that can independently transfer data between applications and use it immediately (e.g. send a personalized marketing campaign based on historical user behavior).

Properly implemented BPA (business process automation) technology allows you to build automation scenarios in which data from multiple tools (e.g. CRM, advertising systems or sales platforms) end up in one place — without manual work and transferring information between Excel files.

Example: Instead of logging into Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn, the marketing team enters a single dashboard. Data analysis automation collects the results of marketing campaigns and presents them in real time on the user interface. Thanks to this, the team will check in a minute which campaign is performing best.

Too many tools in the company? See how automation can help

If in your company the number of tools is growing faster than the efficiency of the team, it is a sign that it is time to put the processes in order. An excess of applications usually does not mean greater productivity — it more often leads to information chaos, manual data transfer and rising costs. Well-designed automation and systems integration allow you to regain control of your data, simplify the daily work of teams and increase the return on investment in technology.

Tool integration that eliminates manual labor

Implementing integration between systems may be much more than just transferring data from point A to point B. If you additionally decide to implement effective process automation, it will allow you to build scenarios in which processes are executed independently — without involving employees in repetitive activities.

Thanks to the tools that are connected to each other, the data can automatically trigger subsequent actions: create tasks in design tools, update records in CRM, send marketing communications or generate reports. In practice, this means that the team ceases to act as a “data relay” and can focus on work that requires competence and decision-making. Automation doesn't just speed up processes — it actually takes some of the operational responsibilities out of people.

Automation of data analysis, or how to make the right decisions

Distributed data is one of the main reasons why companies are not using their analytical potential. If campaign costs are in one advertising tool, information about acquired leads in CRM, and data on the value of closed projects in the sales system, the marketing team sees only a fragment of the picture. Thus, it is not able to clearly determine from which campaigns the most “caloric” queries come and which activities actually generate revenue.

If preparing a single report requires logging in to 4 systems — this is not a scalable process.

Integration of tools and organization of data flow make marketing work on its own tailored dashboard that automatically combines this information into a single view. Thanks to this, the team no longer analyzes only the cost of the lead, but the real impact of the campaign on sales.

As a result, decisions are no longer based on incomplete data or intuition. Consistent, automatically updated dashboards allow you to quickly capture which campaigns deliver quality and which only generate traffic. Such business automation makes individual departments in companies start working like a well-oiled machine — processes run more smoothly and decisions are made faster.

Fewer tools means lower costs

Many companies are getting used to expensive subscriptions. Meanwhile, business process automation often allows replace several expensive systems with one, cheaper solution.

Example: Instead of implementing a dedicated B2B booking system, it is enough to integrate Google Workspace (Calendar), which most companies already use, into the website and implement an automated data flow between them.

In some of the companies we help organize processes, we regularly encounter a situation where teams use an excess of tools — often used only partially or for one narrow functionality. Over time, this leads to an uncontrolled increase in costs, because monthly subscriptions of specialized platforms can reach thousands of euros.

A common scenario is the parallel use of several systems for data analysis: separately for marketing, separately for finance, and separately for HR. However, after a thorough analysis of the processes, it often turns out that instead of maintaining many distributed tools, you can implement a no-/low-code solution (e.g. in Airtable), which allows you to handle all dashboards in one system.

This allows the company to pay for only one technology while maintaining complete separation of views for teams. Advanced permissions and filtering mechanisms allow each user to see only their dashboard, while management has access to a cross-sectional view of the entire organization. Equally important, data is no longer dispersed — it is in one consistent environment and can feed into common reports, such as a consolidated financial report for the entire company.

When is business process automation the way of organizing data in a company?

If you have the impression that your employees click more in systems than they actually work with clients or projects, this is usually the first warning signal. Likewise, when, despite the implementation of subsequent tools, you do not see a proportional improvement in the company's performance and the monthly subscriptions increase from quarter to quarter.

This often means that the problem is not a lack of technology, but a lack of consistent flow of information and structured data. When teams manually move data between systems, reports are created in Excel, and business decisions are based on fragmented views, business process automation (BPA) is no longer an “improvement” and becomes a necessity.

It is at such moments that organizing data in the company through the integration of tools and the automation of processes brings the fastest return. Organized data, automated information flows, and role-based dashboards mean that technology is finally starting to work for the result — instead of generating additional costs.