Search the internet for “how to grow a business” and you’ll be flooded with tips, tricks and advice ranging from culture, customer experience and social media to strategy, risk-taking and breakthrough branding, to name just a few.

While much of this content is helpful, very few of these articles address the fundamentals of how to build growth into the fabric of your business.

Large businesses that consistently grow understand that growth is a fundamental part of the company’s DNA. Building your business on a solid foundation of customer-first centralised data and process improvement leads to both happy teams and happy customers – both of which are essential for growth.

Constantly improving every step of your customer value chain improves your business’ overall customer experience. This is best coordinated in an ERP that supports workflow optimisation, enhanced user experience and centralised decision support information.

Three steps to modernise business practices that will grow your business

1. Centralised decision support

By centralising decision support data and publishing a single version of the truth, we are ensuring that teams act cohesively to achieve the same goals.

By improving transparency, we can encourage team initiatives from the bottom up that react faster to customer demands than top-down command and control.

The impact of change must be measured to ensure success. Double down on positive initiatives and quickly abandon negative outcomes. Bedding down one version of the truth mitigates poor decision-making and improves team coordination.

2. Enhance user experience to improve productivity

Upgrading your systems to a business platform that enables you to enhance the user experience leads to faster take-up of improved business practices. More importantly, once your team understands that system changes are not only possible but encouraged and easy to implement, they will embrace continuous process improvement.

When you provide modern business processing tools and make it easy for your team to utilise them, you are enabling your team to focus on improving customer experience.

3. Optimise workflow to increase efficiency and customer happiness

The paradigm shift that comes with workflow optimisation is all about understanding how you can have the greatest positive impact on customer experience. This comes down to how your team performs when things go wrong. Making things run smoothly is easy. Establishing calls to action when things go bad is much more difficult.

Many companies fail to optimise workflow around exception and complaints handling:

• Does your current system alert you when a transaction is stuck?
• Do you have internal service levels to indicate poor customer experience?
• Do you have a pre-determined action plan when a problem is identified?

Conclusion

Building on these foundations enables a business to rapidly improve its decisions, speed up customer service and close the customer value gap. The fundamentals of growth are found in how our business behaves, which is then expressed in terms of customer satisfaction.

About Klugo

NetSuite + NextService

Klugo’s vision is to unlock the full operating potential of our customers to maximise the value of their business. We do this by helping our customers achieve operating excellence using NetSuite + NextService, the world-leading cloud ERP and FSM business platform for small-to-medium-sized businesses.

If you’re searching for a silver bullet to growth, consider focusing on the dynamic of your business first and foremost. You may be surprised at how much growth you can achieve when you have happy teams servicing even happier customers. All of this is only possible If you have invested in a modern cloud ERP that supports centralised dashboards, customer user interface and workflow optimisation.

We hope we’ve provided you with valuable takeaways from this post that you can apply to your business today. To keep receiving Klugo Briefing Posts in future, please follow or subscribe.

User-friendly dashboards constitute a basic aid in decision-making. Data-driven businesses leverage clear and interactive dashboards to make life easier for staff and management.

1. Highlighting saved search detail results.

In the Results tab > Columns subtab, we set the following fields to display in the saved search results.

Under the Highlighting tab > Highlight if… subtab, we will select to use black text colour on yellow background with bold font if the customer is High Impact. We will set a different rule to display a red flag with bold font if Priority is set to S1-High.

The image below shows how highlighting within the saved search helps identify high impact and priority cases quicker.

2. Highlighting saved search summary results.

In the Results tab > Columns subtab, we will set some fields to be displayed and summarised: Company (Group), Date Created (Minimum), Date Created (Maximum), and Internal ID (Count).

Under the Highlighting tab > Highlight if… (Summary) subtab, we will set to use white text colour on red background with bold font if the “Count of Internal ID” is greater than 3.

The image below shows how highlighting summaries can help users quickly identify companies with more than three open cases.

3. Highlighting single cells based on criteria.

In the Results tab > Columns subtab, we will set some fields to be displayed. Notice the addition of a Formula (Text) field that uses SQL formula with HTML formatting. This example will show “Within SLA “ with a green background when the Case Date Created is less than 30 days. It will also display “>30 Days ⚠” with a red background when the Case Date Created is greater than 30 days.

The image below shows how highlighting single cells within the saved search summary results can help users quickly identify cases that have exceeded the SLA target.

Keep evolving your dashboards.

Dashboard without highlighting

Dashboard with highlighting

Klugo specialise in user-friendly implementations optimised to achieve operational excellence. We can ensure that your dashboards are always up to date, making your team’s life easier.

Schedule a call with us today to learn more about improving NetSuite user experience and how we can assist your data-driven strategies.

About Klugo

NetSuite + NextService

Klugo’s vision is to unlock the full operating potential of our customers to maximise the value of their business. We do this by helping our customers achieve operating excellence using NetSuite + NextService, the world-leading cloud ERP and FSM business platform for small-to-medium-sized businesses.

The drive to automate is relentless. But, unfortunately, it’s bound up in the assumption that automation will automatically result in reduced costs, higher productivity and improved production quality.

With all the benefits on the horizon, how could anything go wrong?

Realistically, simply automating to reduce complexity can lead to expensive projects that never deliver a return on investment. Why?

Automation is expensive. It includes the purchase of machinery, new tools, downtime, and even new jobs with specialist skills to ensure the project is deployed correctly.

Similarly, without achieving the right balance between what ‘can’, ‘should’ and ‘needs’ to be automated can be the difference between success and failure.

So, how do you assess what needs to be automated? This article examines three critical components of assessment to determine whether automation is suitable.
 

1. Determine if it is feasible; not all process automation results in improved efficiency.

The lure of automation has drawn many operations managers into the downward spiral of immense costs, and artificial intelligence (AI) projects that never come to fruition.

The automation strategy for Model 3 is a great example of hyper-automation failure.

Elon Musk stated after the project, ‘yes, excessive automation at Telsa was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated’.

So, how did this happen?

The team at Telsa developed an assembly line that was called the most robotics-driven production line in the world. However, during production, the complex network of conveyor belts constantly failed, causing production overtime and ultimately was removed.

What are the learnings from this mistake?

Importantly, across production lines, there must be a balance between skilled employees and equipment automation. Identifying which processes are right for automation and which are not is vital to avoiding the pitfalls of automation failure.

2. Work out the cost of equipment, tools, labour and downtime.

Not all processes are equally suited and reap the intended rewards of automation.

Before devising an automation strategy, utilise four categories to assess if automation is worth the investment:

1. Time and Simplicity: Does the current process take less than 15 minutes or six steps to complete?
2. Frequency: How frequently is the process performed?
3. Repeatability: How repeatable is the process?
4. Human Intervention: How much qualitative analysis and human action is required to deliver the process?

Although complete process automation can tempt even the greatest operationally minded people, knowing the cost of automation versus maintaining a particular process will determine the value of the automation itself.

Much of the costs related to automation requires upfront payment for equipment, tools and technology. These upfront payments are costly, especially as the benefits are not attributed until automation is in full effect.

Once you’ve analysed fixed cost outlay, you’ll need to factor in current processes. For example, establish the cost of labour, production downtime, and the adoption timeframe.

The actual benefits of automation will be acquired when focusing on cost and identifying which systems are dysfunctional. Therefore, improving unplanned shutdowns, processes that add to production costs, bottlenecks or are dangerous activities should be the focus of the automation strategy.

3. Define clear objectives and measures for the automation

When considering deploying automation in a business, the strategy must consist of clear objectives, workforce impact and measurement. Being explicit with goals can prevent misalignment of expectations across management and plant operators.

With objectives in place, there needs to be a consistent measurement of production systems against the automation target. Complete measurement across production systems, instruments and tools will produce vital data that pave the pathway forward.

Measuring effort, lag, waste, idle time, issues and costs all tell a story.

This story allows for a step-change in performance management. Referring to the objectives and intended outcome provides visibility across which step in the process needs to be corrected and does not meet the defined tolerances.

Digitising operations allows for transparency across operations that can serve as a competitive advantage. For example, data transparency can provide visibility to the customers regarding how quickly one can fulfil orders.

To enable integrated production systems, you need to ensure that you have the suitable systems to measure production performance. Key indicators will help you prioritise automation projects and build a faster return on investment.

A critical system to create interconnection of data is having a powerful MES.

MES ensures that businesses can maximise their data capacity and literacy by having clarity over the inordinate amount of data produced.

The team at Klugo specialise in MES implementation. Using key fundamentals of vision, outlining deliverables and measurement, our team can ensure end-to-end deployment.

Schedule a call with the team today to learn more about MES and how it can assist your automation strategy.

About Klugo

NetSuite + NextService

Klugo’s vision is to unlock the full operating potential of our customers to maximise the value of their business. We do this by helping our customers achieve operating excellence using NetSuite + NextService, the world-leading cloud ERP and FSM business platform for small-to-medium-sized businesses.