In this series, entrepreneur and serial business founder Ron Efron shares his experiences and insights from using an all-in-one cloud ERP system to grow a business in China from a small startup in Beijing to a global business serving the Fortune 500 across APAC.

I still find it remarkable how many small and mid-sized companies manage their business data and processes across multiple non-integrated solutions. Large enterprises do not do this; they will use Oracle or SAP to manage their entire operations on a single platform. Yet small businesses will have one system for managing orders, another for accounting, another for inventory and another for project management. The result is that many small businesses suffer from inefficiencies like data duplication, poor data visibility, and manual data management that large companies do not experience.

In my opinion, the absolute priority of any small business should be to find a technology platform that allows them to develop processes and controls for their entire business, not just one department. Historically, small companies have not been able to implement all in one solutions because the only options were hugely expensive on-premise systems. Nowadays there are more cost-effective cloud-based solutions that can help you consolidate business management on a single system.

Admittedly, some companies will have certain system requirements that cannot be satisfied by a single business management platform. In this case, the second best option is a collection of cloud-based systems that can easily be integrated with one another. But if you can map all your critical processes to a single application, you can increase the productivity of your company significantly. In my opinion are countless advantages to using all-in-one systems that can do global financials, CRM, project management, inventory, and other functions on a single platform. As someone who built a business over 10 years using a cloud-based technology platform to run our entire operations, I cannot imagine any other combination of IT systems that could have helped us grow as quickly and as painlessly as we did.

An all in one cloud system helped us compete with longer established multi-national competitors that were many times our size and win. Cloud ERP systems like NetSuite are undoubtedly an excellent way for small companies to become successful large companies.