How I Can Help Your Business

Better information means Business Intelligence, or BI, which is a bit of a buzzword nowadays, but in essence there are two elements to it:

Management Reporting

Many businesses spend enormous amounts of time just producing reports.  Obviously, managers need to know what’s going on in the business, but reporting is often backward-looking and reactive.  Business Intelligence processes help to shift that focus to a more pro-active, forward looking stance.

For example, a metric that tells you the value of orders that you shipped out the previous day is useful, but what does it tell you?  That all the orders went out complete?  That they were all on time?  That there were no faulty goods in the consignments?  Does it tell you which items were out of stock, and when they will be replenished?

Many reports simply list values, or cold statictics.  Often, these are not very helpful – the real story is in the variances, or the times that something unusual or exceptional has happened.  Those are the statistics that you need, as they will help you identify where and when a problem is likely to occur.  With luck you will have enough notice to fix it before it happens, but only if you’re looking in the right places.

Performance Measurement

Generally, business reporting consists of Key Result Indicators – in other words, what happened yesterday (like the example above).  Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have their focus on the so-called Critical Success Factors of a business, and they are designed to produce information that helps you improve these factors.  In general, KPIs are not about money or budgets, but more about process.

If you offer a next-day delivery service from an online mail-order catalogue, it is critical that you meet your delivery target – your customer service and your reputation depend on it.  Therefore, a simple KPI is the number of late orders each day – you need to do anything within your power to ensure that the figure is as close to zero as possible, and most importantly all of the staff know that this is a business-critical issue, so they will do everything they can to achieve an on-time delivery.

Expedio can help you implement fully-featured reporting and information systems, from a few printouts all the way to a full ‘data-warehouse’.  Presentation of the data can be tailored to fit your operation, as well as your preferences. If you are a visual person, you can have a dashboard, or if you like lists, you can have a printout.  Reports can be shared across the web, or internally, and they can be scheduled and automated.

You will also find that much of the data assembly that is currently being done to prepare reports can be eliminated or automated to some extent.  You don’t have to be a huge business for this time-saving to amount to a significant sum of money – giving you a very reasonable rate of return on your investment in the project.

Many people talk in jargon, unfortunately, so you keep hearing about ‘cloud computing’ or ‘agile technologies’ and it all sounds grand, but what does it all mean, and is it relevant to your business?

In terms of cloud computing, it is highly relevant to any business, although it may not be the right time for you for a variety of reasons – that’s exactly why you need help and advice in determining the risks and benefits.

In simple terms, cloud computing means that you cease to have a server in the corner of your office, which serves up the applications that you use to run your business.  Instead, those applications (or specially built equivalents) are run on a remote server, over the internet, and you work through a web browser.

There is a lot more to it than this simple sentence, clearly, but it gives you the opportunity to dispense with a lot of expensive IT infrastructure, and the regular investments that are required to upgrade and maintain it.  Instead, you generally pay a monthly subscription that covers all the operation of your systems, as well as maintanance upgrades, and data backups and all the rest of it.  This can be good for cashflow, and is a much more flexible approach, as it can quickly be changed in line with your business requirements.

Imagine opening a second office – traditionally, you’d need a separate server, or some expensive connectivity between you and the new office, along with all the software you’d have to buy for the new staff, and so on.  With a cloud system, you simply log in and increase the number of users, and simple laptops or desktop PCs and an internet connection is the sum total of the hardware you’d need.

We work with the most flexible and customisable cloud solutions out there, to ensure that we help you get the best experience that you can.

If, like many businesses, you make fairly heavy use of spreadsheets and databases, or you maintain a mailing list, or need to send letters or statements out on a regular basis to your customers, then almost certainly you could save time (and consequently money) by automating some of this work.

Automation can take many forms, from a small macro in Word or Excel, through to the implementation of a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.  In general, small modifications have the best return on investment, as they can be carried out piecemeal over a period of time.  As well as requiring less time and money to implement, the return on investment is more easily measured.

You may be surprised to learn that a lot of business owners don’t recognize all the opportunities that exist for increasing the efficiency of their operation.  This is because they don’t always recognise that time is being wasted by doing what they are currently doing.  They may not be aware that cutting and pasting, or re-typing data, can often be avoided.  They may not know that the job that currently takes a half-day might be finished in an hour, with the right processes and systems in place.

Aside from the time savings, there will be fewer errors generated if you remove some manual elements from a process.  Additionally, you may be able to use some information for additional reporting purposes, thereby providing another ‘hidden’ benefit.

A recent example of something that I have automated for a client is a booking system for an assessment that they offer.  Each booking required a confirmation letter, a questionnaire that the client had to fill in and return, as well as an invoice and some other paperwork.  The letter, questionnaire and invoice are customised documents which were being manually edited in Word before printing.  As you can imagine, it took a good while to retype the same address on each document, fill in all the other details, and then print everything out.

Now, the details are entered once, and a button clicked, and all the documents are generated, ready for printing.  It takes a few minutes now to type everything in and create the letters – a significant time saving, and an increase in accuracy and consistency.

It’s surprisingly common to find that businesses are using systems that are not appropriate, or are not delivering much in the way of value.  This is for a whole host of reasons, but high on the list must be the fact that advice and decisions have been taken on a technical basis, and not a commercial one.

Unsurprisingly, there is a view that computer systems are the province of computer people, so the first port of call if you need a new system is likely to be someone like your IT Support partner, or the person from whom you bought your last PC or laptop.  In general terms, these are technical businesses, accustomed to providing technical solutions.  You will therefore be recommended a system with which they are familiar, and which they can implement and support.

This is not to imply in any way a lack of service by these companies – this is what they do, and they do it extremely well in most cases.  However, they will in all likelihood view your business purely from a technical perspective, whereas the selection of a system is much more than that.

Because this is something you will be using day in, day out, and because it is likely to be supporting a critical aspect of your business, the decision has to be an operational one as opposed to a technical one.  As a user, you are actually far more interested in whether the interface is blue or green, and whether it will ‘do’ certain things.  It makes sense to decide what is important to you before you go searching for a solution.

Then, instead of saying, “I need a Customer Relationship Management system.” and then implementing the first one that ius suggested to you, you will be asking, “I need something that will keep track of my contacts, allow me to manage a newsletter, and remind me when I need to call my prospects and keep in touch with my clients.”

If you establish that the newsletter is the most important thing, then a system optimised for that makes sense.  Alternatively, you may be more interested in a system that will send you a daily email or SMS text, telling you who you should contact that day.  Not all systems do all things, or not effectively, so it makes sense to work with someone like me, who will take a commercial, operational view of your business and help you source what you actually need.