When your accounting software crashes during month-end close, who do you call first? If the answer involves checking whether it is a “network issue” or an “application issue” before you know who to reach out to, then you have run into the most critical issue when working with multiple vendors. For businesses that rely on their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems as the focal point for collecting data and managing their IT stack, this fragmentation creates risk that extends beyond mere inconvenience.
Disjointed oversight and maintenance of your software and broader network assets creates increasing opportunities for something to break and eventually evolve into a catastrophic failure point that could bring down your entire technology ecosystem, shutting your digital business operations down for an indeterminate period of time. For this and other reasons, uniting your IT and ERP support with a single vendor contact provides not only a significant advantage in streamlining your application management, but also helps to prevent disruptions down the line. Here are the biggest challenges to know about when working with multiple vendors, and how to solve them by working with one experienced partner:
The Hidden Costs of Fragmented IT and ERP Support
Juggling different points of contact for support is not unique to technology, but it is endemic to the industry and the traditional approach to handling the legacy infrastructure that used to be common for many businesses. The increasing adoption of the cloud and more digitized applications, however, has made the pain points both more obvious and potentially more severe. Split responsibility creates gaps in accountability that surface precisely when issues need immediate resolution, alongside several other consequences.
When Did You Become the Project Manager?
Managing multiple technology support vendors can too easily become a job of its own. Separate IT incidents trigger the same exhausting sequence: contact one vendor, wait for analysis, get told it is probably the other vendor’s problem, contact the second vendor, wait again while they investigate, and discover neither has full visibility into the issue because they only manage part of the stack.
Meanwhile, your business gets hamstrung because your team cannot interact with your business management applications the way they need to. Orders will not ship because warehouse staff cannot access the inventory and shipping records. Invoices go unpaid because accounting is struggling to piece together data from multiple books. Customers are forced to wait in silence because the service portal is down. Problems cascade, and your employees have to pick up the slack your technology is supposed to handle in the first place.
A Diagnostic Dead End
Anyone who has had to troubleshoot system breakdowns with multiple already has experienced the pain of the runaround. Your managed IT provider can check on your network traffic, your ERP consultant can review application logs, but neither sees the complete picture. The diagnostic process becomes an expensive back-and-forth as each vendor tries to rule out problems in their domain while suspecting the issue lies elsewhere.
This dead-end wastes time and money even before any actual resolution begins, and it reveals a deeper structural problem: when IT infrastructure and applications are managed separately, comprehensive visibility disappears. Neither support provider can definitively answer whether your performance degradation stems from hardware constraints or software inefficiency, because neither monitors the details of both consistently.
Why IT and ERP Service Remained Siloed Historically
Technology systems are generally siloed for maintenance because of the complexity of what lives under the hood, often requiring a certain kind of expertise – you would not immediately assume that a great car mechanic would know how to fix a nuclear submarine, for example. However, the modern digital ecosystem blurs the lines between application environments and networked infrastructure today, from open-sourced architecture to standardized APIs opening up integrations between formerly disconnected apps. The biggest change by far is the fundamental transformation of cybersecurity in this new reality, where everyone interacting with your network has an impact on your data security.
While there is still a bridge between the specific needs of an ERP implementation and general IT helpdesk solutions, keeping these areas siloed can put your business at risk if the wrong incident happens at the worst time. Maintaining a security posture that addresses emerging cyber threats can be significantly hampered by your support vendors arguing over whose responsibility is what.
What Unified Support Actually Means
When one team manages your network, your servers, your workstations and your business management applications, the question “whose problem is this?” disappears. Unified IT and ERP support aligns these priorities because one partner bears responsibility for both fields, breaking down the walls between silos and streamlining solution delivery. Here are some of the top benefits to this approach:
Break Down Technology Silos
Siloed business units represent a known operational risk, but disconnected technology management creates equally damaging consequences. When software support, cybersecurity monitoring and IT infrastructure maintenance operate under separate oversight, each vendor optimizes within their narrow scope without understanding how their decisions affect your broader digital environment.
Security is one area that provides a clear example of how the silos between your systems can expose you to risks. Your MSP (managed service provider) protects your network, manages firewall rules and monitors for intrusion attempts. Your ERP consultant configures application-level access controls, manages user permissions and ensures data encryption. Both vendors are doing their jobs competently within their domains, but neither sees the misconfigured integration permission creating a cybersecurity gap that bypasses typical access rules at the local level.
Proactive Solutions
Unified support enables a shift from reactive response to proactive management, because now you have one team that can see how all the pieces fit together without having to jump through hoops. This also empowers your partner to identify patterns that indicate developing problems before your business experiences disruption.
When you rely on separate vendors, solutions remain reactive, arising only out of necessity and after significant inertia exacerbates the original problem. Each provider is only concerned with what they can see, sticking to their defined scope and areas of responsibility. By the time it becomes clear that the issue requires combined expertise from a resource with visibility into both your ERP and IT infrastructure mechanics, it likely has already stalled your operations.
Cost Transparency vs. Cost Shifting
No MSP or software consultant wants to eat another vendor’s costs, or take ownership of their mistakes. This creates an environment where you can easily be stuck footing the bill from one partner because the other broke something. Even worse, the ambiguity in total pricing makes it harder to accurately budget for your technology investments, meaning that you could very likely be overspending due to lack of transparency.
Working with a single support provider for your ERP and IT needs lets you consolidate these expenses, and then cut through the noise to see what your overall costs are for your digital infrastructure. This provides opportunities to optimize these expenditures, and a good partner will work with you to cut down on waste and focus on what you actually need.
SWK Technologies – Your Single Contact for IT and ERP Support
Unified support transforms IT from a collection of vendor relationships to manage into a strategic asset that enables your business to grow, and SWK Technologies is here to help you make sure you get the ROI you need on your technology without getting lost in troubleshooting. SWK delivers complete IT support – from server maintenance to application management – to take the burden of coordinating between different technology partners off your shoulders and letting you getting back to focusing on running your business.
Contact SWK here to learn more about our comprehensive ERP and IT solutions and services, and discover how a unified support relationship with empower you to get the most out of your technology investments.