Enterprise Management: What It Is, and How It Streamlines Business

If you’re feeling growing pains in your business, it may be time to adopt an enterprise management strategy.

The larger your business gets, the more moving parts the leadership team has to juggle—from hiring new team members to making sure orders get out the door on time.

When you have a strong enterprise management plan in place, you’ll find it easier to keep each area of your business operations moving in sync.

What is enterprise management?

Enterprise management is a group of tools, strategies, and business processes. When combined, you develop a plan and framework to support your operations as a whole. The trick is that each tool, strategy, and process needs to connect to the others—this facilitates the flow of information and helps to reduce redundancies.

Yes, essential business functions like human resources and supply chain management can all exist in their own silos. When this happens, though, you may find that your business moves more slowly, creates its own accidental roadblocks, and even loses revenue or customers.

When you think about each area of your business as being connected to the others, you can remove these silos and experience smoother operation.

For example, a skilled human resources team can help you hire the right people. When you have the right people working with your company, you can more easily keep marketing and sales moving forward. And as sales increase, so does your revenue—allowing you to upgrade your logistics operations.

How enterprise management streamlines business

Ultimately, successful enterprise management will affect nearly all of your core business operations and functions. With this plan in place, you’ll be able to:

• Make improved hiring decisions
• Experience better internal collaboration and communication
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Support enhanced cybersecurity and risk management
• Develop reliable supply chain operations
• Reap higher revenue

You may see additional benefits beyond the ones listed here, too. The positive effects of enterprise management can ripple throughout your organization.

Types of enterprise management

There are seven core areas of enterprise management that you may need to focus on based on your varied business needs.

These include:

1. Strategic management
2. Financial management
3. Operations management
4. Marketing management
5. Customer relationship management
6. Human resource management
7. Information technology management

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Strategic management

Whether you opt to follow a defined methodology like Scrum or create your own system, strategic management is the backbone of every enterprise management plan.

Every management strategy—regardless of how it’s structured—should include the following for success:

• Goals and objectives for your entire company’s performance, as well as for each department.
• Business plans that take you through the next stages of corporate growth.
• An analysis of external influences that are expected to have a potential impact on your operations—both positively and negatively.
• A report of threats and growth opportunities related to your business operation. A complete strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis is helpful here.‍
• Appropriate resource allocation plans to ensure each department in your company has the support they need to work toward your shared goals and overall enterprise management plan.

Financial management

The resource allocation aspect of strategic management bleeds into financial management as well—another important part of streamlining your enterprise operations.

In order to optimize resources, you’ll need a reliable accounting team and tools to help you:

• Manage finances including cash flow, debt, liabilities, and equity. A complete financial picture is required for enterprise management to work.
• Create budgets and forecasts that help keep your company in the black—and prepare for both growth and hard times ahead.
• Conduct ongoing financial analysis to evaluate how stable, efficient, and profitable your company truly is.
• Assess and manage risks in financial markets that can impact your business’ liquidity and ability to deliver on prior projections.
• Create reports to share key financial metrics with other stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Operations management

Of course, for your company to be profitable and stable, you need to have a good handle on your operations as a whole.This includes paying close attention to your supply chain management, too.

When evaluating how well your operations are being managed, think about how your company:

• Manages the production of goods either in-house or with the help of trusted suppliers.
• Handles delivery of products and services to customers, including maintaining promised turnaround times and coordinating across multiple distribution points.‍
• Evaluates and improves processes based on industry factors, customer feedback, and more.‍
• Ensures consistent quality control efforts across in-house and outsourced production.‍
• Stays on top of inventory management including sourcing raw materials, coordinating with vendors, and working to limit lost revenue due to supply issues.

Marketing management

Marketing is another key part of your enterprise management plan—it’s one way you’ll keep your business growing and profitable. A well-formed marketing department will be able to:

• Identify target audience groups and decision-makers responsible for purchasing your products or services.
• Develop marketing strategies to keep the entire business one step ahead of competitors both in terms of product development and sales volume.
• Prepare case studies that showcase how your organization has helped its clients succeed.
• Promote and advertise new products created by your company.

Customer relationship management

Part of growing your business is, of course, nurturing and maintaining strong customer relationships. A dedicated customer experience (CX) team can help keep your users satisfied by:

• Providing follow-up service after a purchase to make sure customers understand and enjoy their new products.
• Managing customer complaint tickets in a timely manner to resolve issues that may negatively affect the company’s brand perception.
• Compiling customer data into profiles that allow for faster and more efficient service.
• Recording customer communications and noting insights around suggestions, ideas, and concerns that can support further product development.

Human resource management

You’ll also need a dedicated human resources team and strategy as part of your broader enterprise management plan.

Some businesses can operate without an HR team. But for many—and especially for those with a large head count—an HR team is essential. They’ll be able to focus on building a strong team and developing a staffing management plan while you work on other aspects of the business.

As you plan your HR management strategy, focus on how they’ll:

• Recruit new hires in a way that balances the current needs of the organization with financial and growth projections.
• Manage team members’ salaries, personnel files, benefits, contracts, and other employment needs.
• Coordinate training and development efforts to support your broader enterprise management plan.
• Develop performance management plans, including setting expectations, providing team members with feedback, organizing reviews, succession planning, and developing growth paths within the company.

Information technology management

Nearly every aspect of an enterprise management plan requires software and internet connectivity—so having a strong IT infrastructure in place is key, too.

Your IT department will be essential for:

• Planning for technology use that makes every other aspect of your enterprise management plan possible.
• Leading systems development activities that allow you to scale and grow your IT solutions along with the other areas of your business.
• Overseeing business data management, including the storage, maintenance, and protection of critical information.
• Implementing cybersecurity and risk management that helps to keep your systems safe from viruses, malware, ransomware, and bad actors.

Enterprise management solutions and tools

While building an enterprise management system necessitates a fair amount of up-front strategy work, there are a variety of software solutions that can help keep your new processes running smoothly.

Consider using versions of the following programs as you build your enterprise management plan:

• Applicant tracking systems (ATS) and HR software programs like BambooHR and Greenhouse that can help you source and hire new team members—and streamline related back-office HR tasks.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce or Pipedrive. These tools are useful for both sales and marketing teams that need to keep track of leads or active customers.
• Supply chain management (SCM) platforms such as Manhattan SCM and Microsoft Dynamics 365 SCM. These tools are helpful for managing warehouse inventory, coordinating logistics, and more.
• Business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools like Microsoft Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud—both of which can help your team predict outcomes, visualize metrics, and create dashboards with historical and real-time data.
• Digital asset management (DAM) software like Brandfolder or Canto. These platforms help to streamline the consistent use of branded assets across all marketing and corporate communications.
• Project management solutions like Asana or Monday, which can help your team track deadlines, improve decision-making, and allocate resources appropriately.

You can also look for an all-in-one enterprise resource planning system that provides many of the above functions as part of a single package.

These solutions are often cloud-based and scalable, so they’re suitable for distributed and growing teams. However, an all-in-one system may come with a higher price point than some of the individual solutions.

If your business is still in its early growth stages, you might prefer to use a selection of the specialized tools listed above.

Enterprise management implementation

In order to implement a fresh approach to enterprise management, you’ll need to focus on a lot of different parts of your business. You’ll need to be focused—luckily, there are enterprise resource planning (ERP) pros who can help you get started.

First, you’ll need to define your overall strategic vision—what you want to get out of the enterprise management process and your ideal future state. Make sure to:

• Assess your current processes, systems, and tools so you have an obvious starting point
• Set the objectives and goals you want to achieve along the way—these milestones will become your implementation roadmap
• Establish a budget for ERP consultants, tools, and training that will help you through the process

Next, you’ll need to get buy-in from your team and other stakeholders who will be involved. This can include:

• Securing your leadership team’s commitment to the process
• Alerting customers to any downtime that may happen in existing user-facing systems while you’re updating any of your technology
• Selecting the systems and solutions providers that you’ll use throughout implementation
• Working with project managers to establish change-management processes

Once you’ve established a starting point, roadmap, and systems to use, you’ll want to begin implementation. This can include:

• Deploying changes in phases across departments
• Testing processes and reporting on findings
• Delivering hands-on team training
• Reviewing feedback
• Developing new iterations of processes and systems

You’ll want to be aware, though, that an enterprise management plan can go off the rails if:

• Leadership isn’t invested in the process
• Your teams aren’t clear on the roadmap that you’ll be following
• You haven’t established change management processes to guide revisions to the plan
• You attempt to launch all changes at once instead of doing a gradual rollout across departments
• You only replace a portion of your existing systems without verifying the compatibility of legacy software

With careful planning, however, you can mitigate many of these potential issues and enjoy a successful rollout. To give your company an even greater chance of success, focus on these best practices for good enterprise management implementation:

• Use enterprise management tools that include automation capabilities, so you can further streamline individual workflows
• Focus on establishing an enterprise architecture that’s cross-functional—don’t let departments remain in silos
• Routinely collect feedback and check in with all parties involved in the implementation process
• Be open to making changes based on feedback—embrace a culture of continuous optimization
• Focus on user satisfaction—both internal and external—with new processes and tools

Manage your enterprise business operations with Upwork

The best way to plan for a successful enterprise management rollout is to work with experienced business management, digital transformation, and enterprise software experts.

No matter how small or large your business network is, you can find just the right person to help on Upwork. From management consultants to project managers, all it takes is an Upwork account—sign up or log in today to get started.

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