With growth and expansion, businesses begin to face many complexities: their business requirements shift; more people get involved in everyday operations; business data becomes divided between different systems; and the variability of what customers want and expect increase. This complication of internal processes, add unnecessary cost and risk to a business making it difficult to control and sail smooth. While most organizations consider process mapping as a useful business tool, a few consider improving internal systems as a significant improvement stratagem. In order to continue growing and improve margin, internal processes or systems need evaluation and refinement.
One pivotal step to set in motion an effective process improvement is to create simple, clear, achievable goals that bind together the process initiatives to business value. These smaller goals will act as the key foundation piece for each improvement project, and it will create the basis of your communication to managers and employees involved in the project in order to elucidate why certain improvements are receiving greater priority. These goals will also provide your business with a sense of liability for accomplishing certain targets.
When deciding which goals to set for your business, take into consideration the points mentioned below for improving internal systems that will inevitably add value to your business.
Reduction of cost through efficiency with integration of ERP
An efficient process will undoubtedly make the process less time consuming, constitute of fewer steps, and help you cut down wasteful activities. Making any business process more efficient will inevitably reduce the cost of the process itself alongside the cost of quality.
A great way to making internal processes more efficient is through the integration of ERP.
ERP allows your workforce a higher productivity rate by enabling you to streamline and automate your primary business processes to help everyone in your organization accomplish more with fewer resources. ERP also enables you to have a method of getting fast-track business and financial reporting and easily share the results, and thus, facilitating improved performance. With efficient operations and ready access to real-time data, you can quickly identify and react to new opportunities, making internal operations swift, and time-friendly.
With the integration of ERP, internal processes become much simpler and efficient, allowing you to cut back unnecessary costing and employ more time where it’s needed.
Improving customer experience & revenue and the integration of CRM
The driving force behind sales success, pricing accuracy, and product development is the maintenance of effective processes on the revenue side of the business (this includes: sales, marketing, R&D etc.). Having a structured process means that you can measure customers throughout their lifecycle and provide them with a consistently good customer experience that your salespeople can use to sell and retain for benefit. This enables your sales manager to actively improve sell rates through means of controlled pricing and discounts. This also helps to reduce the cost of customer acquisition.
Customer experience can also be vastly improved with the inclusion of CRM – a software with one primary purpose which is to improve relationships with clients by providing businesses with smart tools to effectively build a strategy. The CRM software accelerates important business operations like marketing, service, sales activities, etc. to enhance customer experience and increase loyalty from initial contact to repeat purchases. Since any CRM system is created to allow streamlining the workflow of the company, it can easily help businesses to close the gaps marketing, sales, and customer service departments and thus, help companies of all types and sizes reach their goals with minimal costing.
Risk Reduction
Keep your business processes consistent. Consistent processes allow consistent, repeatable, outcomes and repeatable outcomes means less operating risk.
A good example for this would be a manufacturer’s method for quality control. A consistent quality control process will yield the same probability for figuring defects in goods every time. A process constituting of too many variables – such as a process the results vary from person to person, or, shift to shift – is likely to either find too many defects or two few depending on time and shift, increasing the cost of quality and making it very difficult to find the root cause of the issues.
Rigorous, consistent processes allow for root causes to be identified easily and thus, prevent operating problems from existing for long.
The ERP software is also extremely beneficial to reduce risks in businesses because it allows you to maximize your visibility in the market. It also allows for you to monitor internal operations, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and keep your business consistent, and able to predict and prevent risks.
Make your business easier to manage
If your business is easy to manage, it will undoubtedly be more efficient in all ways.
Having predictable processes means that you can organize and categorize them into systems and measure their outcomes without having to observe directly. This means that a good process will allow managers and executives to manage the job without needing to get involved directly.
Both the CRM and ERP softwares help manage businesses smoothly and effectively. CRM systems are usually come with various tracking features that record numerous customer interactions online. In addition to that, CRM automates routine processes and provides managers with tools that allow for tracking and measuring the company’s performance and productivity. This marginally reduces the time consumed in managing such activities, making it easy to manage, and of course, efficient. The ERP software eliminates information silos, gains a single source of truth, and gets fast answers to mission-critical business questions. By using integrated ERP applications that share a database, you can simplify IT and give everyone an easier way to work, making tasks simple and effective, yielding best results in a much smaller amount of time.
Conclusion
All businesses face their own unique set of hurdles but in order to leverage and maintain your business value, internal systems and operations need to run smoothly, and effectively. By managing your internal machinations to a point of acute efficiency, your business will be sure to flourish. Make sure to consider customer relations, manageability, risk and cost reduction, and you’ll be well on your way to an efficient, smooth-sailing, long-run business.
Henry Chen is the digital operation manager at Syncoria Inc, an Odoo-certified partner in Canada.
