Your business was built around specific processes, methods and information that have allowed you to serve your customers in a unique way, stand out from your competitors and secure a strong and loyal following. This uniqueness is reflected in everything you do with and for your customers, from the culture of your employees to the service and functioning of your products. As you grow, so does the complexity of the information technology required to support your business. Making matters worse, you now face a host of government regulations and compliance requirements that threaten to bog you down in an administrative nightmare.
Many of the administrative and compliance aspects of your business can be codified and standardized. You may buy off the shelf software products designed to manage business processes using best practices, as chosen by the software supplier. Unfortunately, an aggregate best practice view of your industry does not seem to apply to your unique business. You have a unique way of managing suppliers, or a multi-channel approach to dealing with distribution and consumer customers. If your system is not keeping up with the process or providing you with the information you need, then you may be in need of a better solution.
Change Stretches Systems
Your plans may be calling for changes in the nature of the products and services you offer, or the markets that you serve. The old systems worked reasonably well for the business as it was defined, but they cannot adjust with enough flexibility to handle your expansion plans. You could choose to keep your old systems and bolt on new systems to deal with the new products or markets. At best, this leads to integration issues where information does not flow easily between these systems and reporting is difficult, which impedes timely decision-making.
As you look around your business, you are likely to find various points where work and information are being managed poorly. Inadequate systems lead to the need for more human intervention, which adds cost, delays, and performance errors. Over time, you find more and more essential processes, from order taking to forecasting and service delivery, are being managed manually. Many processes are taking too long, customer service is suffering and getting information from the business is very difficult. Cumulatively, these processes are an inefficient drag on your business.
Find the Choke Points
If you rely on a suite of software products to run your business, you may find that certain types of information are simply not well managed by the existing system. This includes that pile of overdue invoices, online order processing, information flow between production and administrative systems, planning and forecasting in production and supplier management, compliance and real-time reporting for optimal decision-making. Small operational or customer service issues can easily be overlooked and even patched up by adding another human being, but they too present an increasing threat to the performance of your business.
You can achieve significant improvements in the performance of your business overall by examining each specific process or information logjam and automating them with custom software. The good news is that these problems can be solved one at a time in a way that keeps your business running and does require a disruptive complete overhaul of existing systems. Analyze each area and then map it onto a chart to prioritize it according to the impact on the business in terms of cost, customer service, time delays and time to completion. Start with the highest impact process first and you’ll quickly begin to experience the benefits. Managing a series of short-term projects can produce results that are more predictable and quicker than a large multi-year monolithic project can.
Turbo Charge Your Advantage
A good software partner adjusts their work to match your priorities and your specific business needs. This means delivering a working product that integrates well with your existing systems on time and at the cost expected. It also means delivering software that enables systems to work and provide information without requiring added human beings to support it, or special training to operate it, or to extract information from it. If your unique processes and systems are being held up by manually managing essential business processes, it may be time to acquire some custom software to turbo charge your competitive advantage.
Pioneering Your Vision
