I don't know if it is just me, but everywhere I turn, I am seeing examples of businesses using technology to innovate their business. At one time it was in shows and movies but it was hard to tell if it was real or make belief. But now I am seeing commercials, articles, and ads of businesses using technology as their competitive advantage. By advertising their innovation to their customers, they are letting their customers know that they have a competitive advantage of choosing them over their competitors. This could be your company as well.

At The Business Solution www.thebusinesssolution.com we build those kind of technological solutions. If your company is thinking, or wants to take it to the next level, contact me at our website. I will discuss the pros and cons of your options with you and then you can decide how to proceed.

Contact us even if you only have an idea that you want to discuss with us. It might be the best contact you made this year! 

I am pleased to announce the launch of www.whatwouldkeithdo.com . On this website I will post common business issues or scenarios and how I would handle them. Most time the solution will evolve around technology, because as you know I love solving business problems using technology. You are free to comment and discuss my answers to the questions as well as feel free to ask questions and I will do my best answering your questions.

Just getting started so there is not a lot of activity yet, but keep your eye on it as over the next few weeks I will be adding more and more.

So here is to doubling your sales and running your business with less stress! 

From June 2009 BusinessWeek

Coca-Cola use to operate like ants in a colony when it came to stocking product in their 12,000 merchant stores. Each morning the drivers would come to the warehouse to receive their instructions and would then do their rounds to the store and at the end of the day return to the warehouse to check in with the boss. The drivers were on their own for the day and one of the problems associated with this model is that they could not adjust during the day to changing needs.

Solution

They now use smart phones and cloud computing to stay in constant contact with the boss and the warehouse. At the end of each stop they complete and online survey that gives the company a complete picture of sales trends and relationships with the store manager in real time. This allows Coca-Cola to react in real time to changeing condition.

Coca-Cola may be large but you will see small business jumping on this trend in the near future as small business is more open to change, are more flexible, and last but not least, are looking for a way to be competitive with the big companies.

I am often asked if there is an easier way to stay on top of providing a product or service. And the answer is yes. If you been in business for any length in time you come up with ways to manage pieces of the complete work flow. The problem is that there can be many pieces to make up the full work flow and as each piece is not connected to the other pieces in this home grown solution it becomes tedious to manage, error prone, you have to enter the same info into multiple pieces (which leads to entry errors), it is impossible to get a birds eye view of the whole process so you can't plan, you can see the bottle necks, can't see where you are short on resources.

How we handle it at The Business Solution is that we create one software/web system that manages from cradle to grave of the sales life cycle including the work flow of providing the product or service. You only enter things once. You can see the big picture. You can see the bottle necks. But most important it usually greatly increases capacity because you are not wasting time managing the process and you are able to be dynamic and pull resources from one area to another as you can see where resources are needed and other areas where resources are idle.

 Less stress. Better managed business.

A McDonald’s in Harlem runs just as profitably (and predictably) as a McDonald’s in Beverly Hills, because there is no area that does not have the procedures down to the letter. What’s more, the employee turnover rate at McDonald’s is 200% per year, but it doesn’t matter. Everything is so well spelled out that new people can be put into the system and function at an optimum level very quickly. If you ever want to have a business that can function without you, or replace staff with people who enter the business at peak performance, right from the start, you must have excellent policies, procedures and plans. Jay Abraham

A smart sailor will consider an investment in charts and navigation tools; like nautical slide rulers and course plotters; to be money well spent. Sure some may rely on the old tried and true methods of celestial navigation and calculate position with the stars and a compass, but those sailors are far and few these days.  Today’s sailors admit (like all of us) that we love the convenience of electronic navigation--whether it's with an electronic chart plotter, a GPS, or simply our computer.   Why not navigate our businesses in the same way? With the proper tools, it is some of the best insurance you can buy.   So what would typical “process” navigation for placing an order at a print shop look like?

1.       Customer orders business cards

2.       Art department gets initial design for customer

3.       Art department creates design

4.       Customer shown proof for approval

5.       Print department checks that they have materials to make business card

6.       Print department schedules time on press

7.       Print department prints business cards

8.       Shipping department packages business cards

9.       Customer notified order is ready and picks it up

10.   Admin marks order completed

Your system should be letting you know that there was a delay getting to the press as the machine could not keep up with the volume of work. This would allow you to find a way to increase capacity like run a second shift; or get another press. The system should know what your sales are, who your customers are and what their purchase history is.  You should know who your prospects are and have a system in place to turn them into happy customers.

Your system should be a business dashboard that lets you see the status of your business at this point in time and in the future to let you know whether or not you are on track. And this electronic navigation tools needs to be convenient and would be an investment well spent.

I met with a prospect the other day and they said they been doing things the same way for years. While they had added computers to the business process, the computers were just replacing pen and paper. They said they thought there was a better way but were unsure of what to do. This is pretty typical, many people can't see the forest for the trees. I told them what needed to be done is map out the complete work flow from trying to get a prospect to completing the sale and to filling the order. Then we would look at all tasks to make sure that they were adding value to the process, that they still made sense to do and not just doing it because we have always done it that way.

The next thing we would do is look at what they want their business to look like in ten years. By knowing where they want to be we could start laying foundation now to  allow the company to reach it's ten year goal. I then asked them what things would you love to automate or make easier in their business. I asked that they do not limit themselves to what they think is doable, let us decide that. You might think something is impossible and we thing no big deal, other times we get asked to do what the customer thinks is a no-brainier and there is no way we could make that happen for at least a few more years until technology advances to make it possible.

We then got talking about mundane tasks that people have to do that follows some sort of pattern. I told them if you can define the pattern we could build software that follows their business rules with no human intervention. For example say you want to send a customer a thank you letter 2 days after the sale if the customer took the product home with them or if the product had to be delived, 2 days after delivery. If that date fell on a holiday or weekend move it to the next business day. We could easily program into the software to print those letters at the right time without a person going in and trying to figure out who to send letters to add put the letter together. It would be something like a pop up when you log into the program in the morning asking do you want to print up thank you letters? You click yes and go to the printer grab the letters and stuff them into envelopes and out the door they go. Easy enough to do even after a long weekend. 

Another customer of ours use to take a week of hard work to put together a mailing for an open house. There would be names in a label program, customer lists, trade show send me more info ballets etc that would have to be all combined together in a label program. Then they would have to check for duplications in labels. They they had to check that addresses were complete, and on and on. For their last mailing it was a no stress click a button and watch the labels print out. Complete job was done 40 mins later. So a week of hard work and stress or 40 mins of bliss, you choose.

I can go on and on. Any time is a good time to try to do things the easy/fast way but in these times of trying to get more done with less it makes even more sense to spend a little to save a lot. And did I mention how much more professional you would look, how happy your customers are in dealing with you.

As a Certified Management Accountant I can work with companies to map out their business process. Then we can look at technology to see how it can improve the process. It is not unusual for a new system to allow staff more time to work on other aspects of their job or in some cases make the position obsolete.