2021 will be a year like no other as all businesses will be readying to take off with speed after going through all the disruptions in 2020. Every small business will look at strategies that will make them more efficient, competitive and customer focused. Some of the aspects that we shall focus today are on operational efficiency, customer focus and quality. We will on purpose not speak on marketing and digital strategies today because companies will more or less in all certainty aligned their digital marketing goals already.
Operational Efficiency- Operational efficiency determines how quickly companies can deliver their orders to customers. It also relates to how they are equipped to measure their operational cash-flows, balance sheet and fulfilling of regulatory compliance. These aspects are very important to running a successful business. Operational efficiency for a manufacturing company can mean how well the assembly line is functioning so that it can scale up from ‘X’ to ‘X+5’ machines per day without any significant effort. It will also mean that there is no deterioration in quality when numbers are scaled up.
Measuring company finances is important to ensure that the operations are running smoothly. These typically relates to month-on-month cash-flows, maintaining a healthy debt to equity ratio and keeping parameters like cash-burn under check. Operational efficiency also relates to paying your taxes in time, maintaining your licenses up-to date and fulfilling any other regulatory requirements from time-to-time.
Customer Focus – Customer focus is essential to help maintain customer confidence in your abilities to deliver as well as ensuring that a customer can become a repeat customer. Customer focus and quality go hand-in-hand. Elements of customer focus are delivering work on time, taking customer feedback seriously etc. Providing post sales support as required is also one of the important factors of customer focus. These factors go a long way in creating a loyal customer base that stays with you thru thick and thin.
As part of the digital transformation companies need to deploy customer focus tools such as Salesforce CRM or any other that will make it efficient to manage customer touchpoints. Customer focus can lead to better cross selling opportunities and deriving more revenue from the same customer.
Quality- The
measure of quality relates directly to how often customers will come back to
you to get their work done. If you have been working with the same customer for
the last 4-5 years, it can be safely said that you have been able to hold to
the same quality standards that are expected from your organization. As far as
quality goes, “You are only as good as your last work”. This essentially means
that no matter how old the customer relationship, you have to keep focusing on
delivering quality work time and time again.
Now let us focus on some Digital tools that companies can fall back upon to execute these strategies. Operational efficiency can be measured by using tools such as project trackers in case of service industries. This gives a clear indication of how long a project is taking, any improvements noted from the previous projects done, etc. In terms of manufacturing tools to measure the supply chain and Just-in-Time manufacturing should give a good measure of efficiency. In terms of manufacturing industries, some of the key parameters to measure are how soon suppliers are supplying the orders, how much finished inventory do I have and how soon am I able to fulfill customer orders.
Customer focus will relate to customer connect, feedback and improvements. One of the most accepted tools in the market is the Salesforce CRM. Some of the other digital tools that companies can use for customer connect are InMoment and Qualtrics.
Measurement of quality is a challenge for both services and manufacturing sector especially in the SME segment. This is often because of human errors that are very difficult to detect. In software the quality tests are done by using testing of the software as per defined processes to ensure that the solution is performing as per expectation. However, it is often difficult to analyze how optimized the coding is so that the solution efficiency is optimum.
In the case of manufacturing, SME’s very often do not have standardized processes. This prevents them from ensuring quality for every batch of machinery made. In some cases a small difference in fitting a certain part manually can cause significant changes in the performance of the machines. Therefore to ensure quality, companies need to implement more automated systems that will ensure faster production times and better quality of products.
Developing business strategies for small businesses is a challenge as most of the time the owners are tied up with their regular activities. Connect with us at info@intelligentq.co.in so that we can help you getting things off the ground with the right business strategies for 2021!
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