Your business is dynamic and your software is diverse. GRAYBOX consultants bring deep experience to help support your business and tools, letting you focus on your business instead of your technology.

Regardless of the tools your business has deployed, the nature of business software is that it is evaluated and implemented at a point in time, based on the needs and capabilities at that time. The challenge is that businesses and tools are dynamic, meaning the more time goes by, the greater the likelihood that your business tools are no longer aligning with your business needs. Sometimes a second set of eyes can help uncover inefficiencies, or bring new capabilities to light, that can make a meaningful difference to your processes. Not every problem requires new tools. Often the tools we have can offer the answer, and we just need that objective perspective to uncover the path.

GRAYBOX often works with our client partners for ongoing business software consulting and support. In many cases a company is already running a great ERP or CRM system, but their implementation is 2-3 years behind them. The business has evolved in that time to include new services, discontinued product lines, more employees, or competitive pressures that require more visibility to the health of the business. In these scenarios, the solution is generally not to evaluate and implement net new tools. Instead, it can be helpful to have someone deep dive on the processes, people, and tools that are in place in the business, and help optimize and evolve those tools within the existing ecosystem.

There are a lot of benefits to taking this approach. It's almost always significantly less expensive to tweak and optimize an existing set of software tools than it is to replace them. The software purchase, implementation, and migration process is not a small endeavor, which is why businesses tend to only tackle this every five to six years. Working within the boundaries of your existing tools can offer a lot of lift in your day-to-day operations with small, incremental changes. In addition, the nature of most software tools today, especially SaaS software tools, is that they are more flexible than their counterparts of the past. This means there tends to be a predictable stream of new features being rolled out to users, and generally a flexible set of APIs in the application, that allow you to evolve your use of the tool to meet your business needs. It's challenging for a business to stay on top of the latest news and capabilities of every tool in their arsenal, which means these advancements tend to go unnoticed and unused. Finally, users tend to build inertia with their day to day processes. In many cases, a process, workflow, or series of steps are repeated simply because that is how the person was trained, or because that is the way it has always been done. There are often ways to improve or eliminate processes in a business, but it can be hard to identify those opportunities from within the business, whereas it can be easier to spot them from an outside perspective.

GRAYBOX can provide a lot of value to customers who are already running business systems and just need knowledgeable, reliable talent to help them maintain, support, and optimize those tools. Bringing to the table experience that spans many business models and software tools, GRAYBOX consultants work to deeply understand your business and how it runs, and from there we can provide ongoing guidance, recommendations, and execution to improve your tools. Our consultants are pragmatic-- we understand that different requirements necessitate different types of solutions. We excel in understanding that balance and bringing valuable options for consideration are vital in being able to execute on the right option for your needs.