Tons of books and insights were written during last twenty years about value of teams, leaders, employees engagement, time management etc. And all of them with one idea: to help businesses to understand that value of their business proposition is created by people, promoted by people and managed by them.
Sounds simple and true. First value of any-scale investor or manager: time is money. A company is paying to employees for hours spent at work, understanding that value is created through a continuous efforts and application of their capabilities. And with growing business different “stopping” factors are growing as well: old habits to administrate new processes, volume of paperwork, amounts of disrupted data.
This causes that less and less attention is paid to a customer satisfaction, new solutions development, innovations implementation – all what drives company up comparing with its competitors. Engagement and motivation of employees is “eaten” by an increasing number of routine activities. Ordinary periodic matters are catching more time of employees for company’s self-administration.
According to a recent Steelcase research “Engagement and the Global Workplace”, US companies are still very rigid to implement mobile technologies and remote co-working: 26% of employees are provided by employer with a mobile phone and only 35% sometimes work out of the office.
This seems unlogic: almost all of consumers are “sleeping” with their smartphones and tablets, being always online for personal and business issues. Companies are still managing their business with the desktop and a landline phones, despite the fact that availability of business data on managers mobile gadgets may greatly increase the efficiency of the business.
The core of the problem is internal disrupted data. If you want your salesmanager to have sales numbers always available for you, he may keep an excel file with them on his smartphone. But sales is just a part of your business. So, for an integrated instant picture you will need to contact 3-4 more people who may not be instantly available with their data on hand.
This is a very common picture: to get an information about different processes and data in the company may take days and even weeks. And more the business is growing – more time to find and integrate the data you need. Routine activities drastically impact not only the business results but also manager’s thinking and speed and effciency of the decision-making.
Let’s take the impact of recent cloud technology development for microfinance organizations. A simple decision to put core banking software in the cloud may lead to lower cost of borrowing up to 90%. Choose a right partner – develop a plan and risk strategy – transfer into cloud – get the profit.
In the same way ERP cloud solutions may bring any-scale company to a completely new integrated way of doing business, when all employees are delivering value and ideas directly converted into company’s profits rather then spending huge amount of time with multiple sources of internal data. And still many companies did not get understanding of necessity of data integrity for their consistent and right decision-making.
One needs to distinguish between high-frequency decisions (daily business operations) and low-frequency decisions (implementation of new account and management system). Increasing number of first category events drives to a decreasing probability of the secong category events due to the fact that low-frequency decisions require time and responsibility. As the result, managers revert to old ways of doing things, and performance does not improve.
The true is that clients care about value of your products and services and completely do not care what you need to achieve this value. Spending time to a constantly increasing paperwork, long-decision making is very unproductive in today’s digital fast developing world. Managers must be energetically focused on real business opportunities and spend their time achieving KPI.
ERP solutions proved their efficiency in boosting profits and overall business results by creating a stable integrated data platform that provides managers of all levels with accurate, instant information about all processes in the company.
Ultimately, business growth is about integrity, creativity and speed of action based on actual, easy-convertible and fast operational and fundamental management data.