Are your business systems on point for 2022?
Did the holiday season provide you with the time to reflect on your business and consider the quickest path of value for your customers and employees?
If it did, you likely challenged yourself to dig deep and identify key areas affecting your customers. You probably recognised what’s held you back from growth or potentially impacting services or responsiveness to our changing market conditions.
However, do you believe you have true visibility of the issues occurring at a granular level? Are your staff accepting of the processes that they are now ingrained in? Is there a lack of connectivity that’s preventing your business flow? And, how will the quickest path to value influence your profit?
It’s time to revisit your processes. Ask yourself the following questions to help challenge critical areas and the value of continuous improvement:
1. Systems functionality
- Are your current systems performing well in peak periods?
- Are your teams losing productivity because of workarounds between different platforms?
2. Flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements
- Do you have the capability to automate or reduce current steps to transact with your business?
- Can your systems be adapted to changing market conditions and new business opportunities?
3. Integrate your business systems
- How many repetitive tasks are performed hourly or daily?
- Is your team entering the same information into multiple applications?
4. Analysing raw data from multiple sources
- Do you have access to actionable data to grow your business?
- Is it time-consuming for team members to analyse raw data?
- Do you have access to dashboards and analytics to help boost your productivity and react quickly to opportunities or challenges?
5. Monthly and annual licence fees
- Do you have a handle on your current software licensing fees?
- Do you have a good understanding of the level of functionality utilised by your business to justify the software’s ROI?
6. Business system providing a competitive edge
- Are you able to continuously improve your customers’ experience?
- How flexible are your systems?
- Can you quickly implement improvements to gain or maintain an edge on your competitors?
7. Ease of Use
- Are you facing challenges when on-boarding new staff and training them to use your current systems?
- Are your systems complex, with new staff prone to mistakes?
8. Consistent System Performance
- Have you experienced recurrent system faults that impact your staff’s productivity and customers’ experience?
9. Data Security
- How secure is your data?
- Can you manage access levels and security to prevent data leakage?
- Is there sufficient transparency and accountability of users?
If any of these points resonate with your situation, then you need to set time aside to evaluate your system needs and determine the level of impact it has on your long-term goals.
During your evaluation, be sure that your critical users have a voice at the table. Place emphasis on open conversations to help uncover “system blind spots” and share its limitations or workarounds that operate at the expense of the business.
Your evaluation must follow a framework to quantify high-risk versus low-impact and it must establish a priority level. If this is conducted by a business owner or ICT staff or a consultant, you’ll require the granular detail to complete the risk assessment and define the future priorities of your systems.
The end result of this assessment will be a blueprint of critical requirements to define your system needs and be on point with your business goals for the rest of 2022 and beyond.
AB Web's are highly skilled software developers that specialise in the design and development of custom software systems to streamline operational processes and integrate business systems. We pride ourselves on helping our customers grow through stronger customer engagement and enabling your staff to work smarter.
Learn more about AB Web and our recent projects at https://abweb.com.au/ and the value we bring to our customers.