Considering any business, the huge investments the mid and large scale company's make, defiantly the ROI don't liquidate that quickly as the company expects and the cost may still go up if not rectified on time, keeping up with innovation is one thing and transforming the existing loop holes is another but which becomes former and which becomes later is one of the most critical decisions that a company has to take.

Millions of dollars are spent in bringing in the cutting edge technology to the business, but the very foundation is forgotten while such business critical decision are made, a company that I know had spent millions in transforming its process, but the personnel working with these technology's were reluctant to use it, and the main reason being they were so use to their legacy system that any thing new challenged them with their existing jobs, even the most costly in house trainings did not help, and to the managements utter dismay it had to still depend on the 3rd party support.

Having a notion that by investing in your process your business is transformed it is incorrect, as the innovation that you invested in is still human and would only start minting the money for your business only when all the processes are aligned and procedures are laid out.

I could tell you one such blunder a retail company in an Arab world had made, even before the company could correct its point of sales, inventory or ware house management system, had decided to implement a finance and supply chain management for its back office, and still having its Point of sales -legacy system, once the deal was finalized by a persuading vendor with a good track record, the system was implemented, in the first half management incurred lot of cost for mapping the system and putting in all its available resources for making it a success, and when the project had been implemented, management had decided to replace its point of sale system,now here the system had to be reworked all again, that was because company's personnel were able to fiddle with business critical data and also provided reports to management incorrectly with the POS system they had, and it was obvious the management had to replace its POS system too,but if the same was analyzed even before finalizing the Back office, the management would have saved million of dollars, for the vendor it was a sale but for the business it was the cost that kept hiking each year.

It is very important that for a successful business its important all the people working in all the grades in the company are on the same boat, most of the time its miss communication between departments, ego problems that exist between personnel of high cadre, to add a cherry to the cake company even goes about bringing in highly paid 3rd party auditors, which are of hardly any help.

So it is very important all the departments are studied well in hand, before making any move for any new investments, today’s business has become so monopoly that you might have to purchase a particular product from one and its fix is with another, their by wasting considerable amount of time for getting an solution, its import to know who is who in the business and what solution each of the company’s are offering, sometimes even a small software pro gramme can be a great solution but going with the brands in the market is necessarily not the solution , for example any software or hardware vendor can be put out of its bag, once its references are closely analyzed and studied and always having a pilot project done before finalizing a complete package with them.

Planning necessarily is needed, infrastructure and processes should be analyzed way before, and even if the company requires re arranging its resources it should be done without giving it a second thought. Some time your own resources are the best people to help you in transforming the business.