OPTIMISE YOUR CHANCES OF SUCCESS!

The challenges of a growing business and how technology and accountants can help optimise profits.

All businesses depend on the efficiency of the interaction between three key components; the people who work in the business (its organisation); the procedures and work practices of the business (its processes); and the tools and systems used by the business (its systems).

As a business grows in size and complexity, the interaction between the organisation, processes and systems of a business can become stressed by the activities the business implements to drive growth:

• A growth in new products and services - whether introduced to gain market share, grow the revenue base or simply increase profitability.

• A growth in transaction volume - whether through more customers, or more purchases per customer.

• A growth in staff numbers - where more people are hired into the business to help cope with the higher levels of activity and tasks.

• A growth in business locations - where operations are dispersed to get closer to new markets and customers.

Coping with growth

To cope with growth, the three conceptual components of the business need to be configured appropriately:

• The right people need to be brought into the organisation.

• Processes need to be structured, formalised and monitored.

• The right systems need to be identified and implemented.

Finding appropriate systems

Every business relies on a primary business system - a central repository of the business's activities. For regulatory and compliance reasons, as well as for visibility of the financial health of the business, the accounting function is usually the first choice.

As the business grows, this primary system is called upon to do more and more things: invoicing, processing sales orders, processing purchase orders and keeping track of inventory, and more.

Yet when a business is growing, the primary business system assumes a significance beyond record-keeping and compliance. It becomes a central point of access to all of the business's critical management information.

"Bolting-on" other functionality does not necessarily make the most sense for a rapidly growing business if the added functionality comes at the expense of inflexible processes or, worse, if the added functionality wasn't designed with a rapidly growing business in mind.

Advantage One has developed a specialised 'health fitness' plan which enables businesses to get behind the numbers to reveal more. It can help add value beyond specific features or functionality. Investing in a flexible and configurable system provides the business with the opportunity to implement more structured processes and actively improve the efficiency of operational tasks and activity throughput.

Some of the areas that can be explored to help focus on an appropriate business system include:

• Are you actively thinking about making use of the massive amount of data within your systems to make better business decisions?

• Are you deploying the right products and services at the right price and at the right time to satisfy and delight your customers?

• Are your business processes configured in the best possible way for you to procure, make and fulfil your customers' demands in the most cost-effective and time-efficient manner?

Integrated systems

Remember, to help manage the growing pains, your systems, processes and people need to be integrated with the minimum amount of "friction". In the end, no matter how powerful or "feature rich" a business system, it's the extent to which it can be integrated with the people and processes that will ultimately determine its usefulness.

The important thing is how the business makes use of the basic data and information in its systems to make business decisions and drive improvements.

We can be 'Your Advantage'.

Tony Martin - Director, Advantage One

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