Even as lot and labor shortages and other supply side constraints continue to impact builders, and while the cost of building materials continues to rise, the demand for housing continues to increase at a fairly consistent rate. “November’s builder confidence reading is close to a post-recession high-..” NAHB Chairman Granger MacDonald said in a recent release.
Supported by rising homeownership rates and a reduced number of available homes for sale, the trend up is expected to continue.
Increased competition for new business opportunities in the building market require that home builders and developers leverage available technologies and IT resources to improve operational performance and increase the profitability of every project. Applications for better estimating, project and cost management and accounting represent the foundations for information management and supporting the flow of work.Extending workflows to embrace mobile workers and remote offices is the next step to developing an efficient anytime/anywhere business. 92 percent of U.S. construction executives believe that technology will fundamentally change their businesses, and help them bridge the performance gap, according to KPMG’s Make it, or break it – Global Construction Survey 2017 report.
Collaborating while on the go and exchanging ideas and concepts quickly helps businesses be more agile and better-able to meet changing customer needs. Remote and mobile access provides businesses with mobile office options that allow users to get their jobs done no matter where they happen to be.
Business moves at a fast pace and working smarter means implementing the right IT to keep moving up with the demand and creating sustainability for leaner times.
A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships
Most businesses recognize the importance of creating a quality experience for customers doing business with them. The thing that many business owners overlook is how their internal workflows and information management systems serve to either support or impede the delivery of a well-rounded positive customer experience. Growing businesses must adjust their processes and improve their tools in order to have the necessary information available to workers at various levels of the organization, providing a centralized means for collaboration, data sharing and analysis. With the right information systems and process support, even small businesses are able to function at exceptionally high levels and provide the consistently high-quality service and customer experience that establishes long-term value in each and every customer relationship.
Businesses which excel at providing very high levels of customer service tend to have a few common characteristics – features of the business that identify it as an organization geared towards growth and success in driving the customer engagement and business value. Among these characteristics is the recognition of the need to use technology better – leveraging automation to a greater degree to create consistency in work performance, and improving information collection and integration to provide more context and depth to the data. Added efficiency which affords employees time to focus on customer oriented tasks and elevating the customer experience even more is the payback.
Many CRM solutions describe the benefits of a “360 degree” view of the customer, yet these solutions often orient themselves to supporting only sales and Contact Management and do not address product and/ or service delivery (fulfillment of what was sold/ordered) or project management, contracts and agreements tracking or other aspects of doing business with the customer.
Granted, customer interaction occurs most frequently with sales and service teams, but there are potentially vast number of processes and tasks performed within the business which operate with the same information as sales and services, and which would benefit by integration within the same information and workflow framework.
By selecting a solution that addresses the wider variety of business and information management requirements rather than focusing solely on sales and support, business owners and managers find that they are better able to address internal workflows with streamlined process automation.
The result is significant improvement in the quality and completeness of the information available to users throughout the organization, ultimately improving the quality and nature of customer engagement and interaction. Perhaps even more impactful is the ability for the business to better understand the context of and motivations for customer interactions, and (most importantly!) having the capability to take immediate action based on that knowledge.
With the right customer relationship and business management solution in place, and with a focus on systematic approaches to enabling process and workflow automation, businesses can become more flexible and responsive to changing customer needs and expectations. Creating the complete view of the customer relationship and capturing the data which helps users understand the dynamics of the entire relationship serves to build closer customer relationships that will strengthen and grow over time.
When a business needs to implement a Customer Relationship Management solution to address sales and support needs, it makes sense to also review information management requirements for:
Delivery of products and/or services – i.e. fulfillment of what was promised by sales
Scheduling of Work/Service Orders and integrated billing based on completed work
Time and personnel activity management as well as time reporting and billing
Project or job resource and time management and reporting
Documents, contracts, before & after pictures, and agreements of all types
Products and services, proposals and quotes, price books and channels
Additionally, since the processes are so closely related in terms of the information collected or used, it makes sense that the CRM solution would also work with:
Marketing campaigns and activities, lead generation systems and e-newsletter solutions
Accounting solutions which also utilize customer, product, job, time, cost and other data
Expense spending management, approvals and reporting
To be truly useful, the solution must also support remote and mobile workers since field service personnel and other workers are often not in the office when they need to get something done. Whether the access is via hosted solutions providing full remote desktop functionality, or via web-based application extensions allowing device independent access (or both!), the solution should be designed to allow users to access the system and perform their work from wherever it is required.
Even more, a comprehensive approach to managing business activities and information, particularly with a focus on providing all departments with all the information and capability they need to get their jobs done properly, requires that everyone in the company be on board. There really isn’t a great way to centralize and manage critical business data when the approach is to give a few people some information and functionality, leaving it up to human beings and individual initiative to connect the dots (and the data). The result is almost always a series of gaping holes in various processes where information and requests get lost.
Among the best solutions I have found which delivers the foundation for all of this functionality is Results CRM. Thousands of users have successfully migrated from ACT!, Goldmine, Telemagic, Salesforce.com and other SFA and CRM solutions to the Results CRM platform, and have benefitted from better workflow automation, more logical company and contacts associations, and a broader range of functionality supporting everything from sophisticated quote and proposal development to comprehensive project, time and expense management.
At the end of the day, it’s the reporting that wins. If the data isn’t in the database, you can’t report on it. If you can’t report on it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t make good business decisions and grow the business.
Degrees of Success: Improving Productivity and Performance through Process Automation
Few businesses use just one solution to get all their work done. In most cases, the business must at least communicate, produce information and account for financial activities – and each of these functions has a software product or service associated with delivering the required capability. While every business uses technology at some level, some businesses have more success than others in developing streamlined and efficient processes guiding the various tasks and activities performed throughout the day. Sometimes the problem stems from a lack of understanding of the importance of process automation, and sometimes it’s the software.
The success (or lack thereof) in streamlining a business process is often enabled by the tools supporting it, yet the truth of software and systems is that not everything is easily integrated and not all business workflows actually “flow” smoothly. In many cases it is left to the human user to connect the processes and keep the work flowing, creating the opportunity for missed deadlines, duplicated or erroneous data, and a greater dependency on individual worker knowledge than is good for the business.
The better alternative may be the adoption of workflow and automation tools to assist with bridging and scheduling of repetitive tasks, building the knowledgebase of process and task flow supporting business sustainability efforts and easing the burdens of training new employees. Process automation helps to improve productivity, it’s just that simple.
If the time is taken to really consider the variety and numbers of repetitive tasks employees perform throughout the day, the cost in time, lost productivity and data errors or omissions would likely add up to far more than initially expected. People tend to adapt to using the tools they are provided, and will find ways to get things done (whether it’s the most effective way or not). The end does not always justify the means, and many businesses ultimately find that it is here – where individual worker initiative and unguided action are most prevalent – that the operation fails to accomplish stated goals.
In order to create a sustainable operation with consistently high levels of production and performance, the business must establish a complete framework for process automation and support. Where existing application and software functionality is not able to meet the requirement, the business should implement specialized tools to bridge the gap and embed the process knowledge in the system.
Scheduled reporting, customer and product data synchronization, import/export routines, data maintenance routines – these are among the tasks and processes which represent the regularly-performed work that may be sucking the user productivity and performance out of the business. It’s a matter of degrees of success, and productivity improvements introduced through comprehensive process and task automation can make the difference between a little success and a lot.
The Language of Accounting: Disconnect between Accountants and Bookkeepers
There are a tremendous number of bookkeeper training programs developed over the years which propose to deliver the essential bookkeeping knowledge (e.g., double entry accounting) required in order to properly service business bookkeeping requirements. Particularly as the CPA profession stepped away from traditional bookkeeping in favor of performing “higher level” and more profitable work, there was and continues to be a great need for skilled and experienced bookkeepers. While it seems that accountants and bookkeepers would be a natural fit for partnering to serve small business client needs, there is often a disconnect between the two which causes the working relationship to not always prove as beneficial as it could. What is the cause of this disconnect? In many cases, it is due to the fact that the bookkeeper training educated the operator on the use of a software product, and not on the fundamentals of accounting and bookkeeping.
Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to look through a lot of bookkeeper training programs, and the thing that stands out is that many of these programs aren’t really training bookkeepers on accounting principles. More frequently, the training is focused on teaching users how to use software (usually QuickBooks). With the number of users of the QuickBooks product, it is obvious that there is a need to educate users on the solution because people need to know how to use their software properly. But it happened at some point in time that a majority of the industry came to believe that learning QuickBooks (or Xero or Freshbooks or Kashoo or whatever) was somehow synonymous with learning bookkeeping.
When I first started working with my father in his accounting practice, I had to use a manual general ledger, check register, etc. It was all manual – computers didn’t come along for a while (yes, I am that old). It was time-consuming, but it taught me the fundamentals. I know what a subledger is. In consumer-friendly software like QuickBooks, you don’t work in the AR subledger; you push the button that says “customers” or maybe “invoices”. QuickBooks, in many ways, doesn’t speak accounting. It speaks record keeping. And this is where the disconnect begins.
An old school accountant will recall the green eye shade days and working with book ledgers and 13-column pads, but even “new” school accounting professionals know that the fundamentals of accounting aren’t available for re-invention. A debit is still a debit and a credit is a credit. Yes, there are intimacies involved which speak to specific treatment of items for reporting and tax purposes, etc., but the essentials of double entry and other basic accounting principles are consistent and unchanging.
The “language of accounting” includes certain precise terms with specific meaning, and this precision in the use of terms simply doesn’t exist in many bookkeeper training programs. Rather than focusing on the fundamental accounting training bookkeepers truly need in order to be of maximum value to the business, these programs focus on helping users become experts in using the software product, or even to become experts at teaching others how to use the solution. While this software expertise may be beneficial in terms of helping accountants work with their clients who use the software, it doesn’t add enough value to the relationship to warrant partnering. What accounting professionals need are bookkeepers who understand bookkeeping and who can apply basic accounting principles to the task. Which software they operate is secondary to that purpose.
Professional bookkeepers, accountants, and the business client are all in a position to benefit tremendously when the service providers team up to provide comprehensive service. The key to making these connections lies with the professional bookkeeper who must not only understand basic accounting principles, but must also be able to speak to the accounting professional in their native language.
Opinion: I think that every QuickBooks training program should include taking the sample data file in QuickBooks, and translating that to a manual accounting system of book ledgers and reports. Then, have the student process a years’ worth of transactions manually and from paper-based source materials (and also make them create and use a manual paper filing system for all that information, and come up with a means to travel to obtain all the documents necessary which aren’t mailed via USPS). The requirement would include generating the bank reconciliations from printed bank statements and cancelled check copies, creating a trial balance from the general ledger and then creating the P&L and Balance Sheet. I’ll bet you end up with a group of bookkeepers who better understand the fundamentals of the accounting process. The other benefit is that these folks will have a much better understanding of the problems in the outsourced accounting model which can be directly addressed and solved by today’s cloud and connected solutions.
The popularity and proliferation of online applications and cloud computing solutions for business has transformed how organizations manage activities, people and resources. The Internet-connected marketplace has introduced both opportunity and challenge for businesses of all sizes, and much of this focus has been placed on the management and control of digital documents and data.
Electronic document management has been commonly used in professional services business for many years, yet has not always been viewed as an essential technology to apply in the context of organizing and structuring the processing of the document. As clients of these professional firms continue to generate and utilize a great deal of paper documentation and written information, firms continue their reliance upon paper files, shared drives, and other more traditional methods of organizing the work, and storing or controlling access to documents. However, key trends in the industry are causing these approaches to be increasingly burdensome for professional service firms, including:
Need to support multiple offices, geographically disbursed team members, and mobile workers and devices
Increasing use of email as a primary tool for collaboration
Introduction of new risk elements accompanying new technologies
Increasing numbers of forms and document types coming from clients
Rising expectations of clients and increased market competition
Growing need for businesses to increase earnings and profitability with fewer resources
Increasing requirement for knowledge management supporting sustainability, creating the ability to retain and reuse best practices and work produced
Advances in the design and underlying technology supporting many document management solutions today have delivered great capability to firms adopting electronic document management approaches.
Benefits of implementation include the ability to create a centralized, searchable documents base which includes all client-related content, including email communications as well as documents and data files. Easy search, access, collaboration, and re-use of information are enabled, and complete audit trails may be retained. Electronic document solutions also reduce physical document storage needs, reducing costs associated with managing and storing paper files, and can better serve business disaster recovery and continuity initiatives.
While today’s electronic document management solutions may address many of the challenges involved in working with large volumes and varieties of documents and data, there are few solutions on the market which address fundamental issues relating to document processing workflows and how they are impacted by various business or data-driven events, or by the availability of people or resources to facilitate the process.
The growing problem facing businesses today is the volume and variety of information which must be organized, processed and archived. The market is sold on the idea that electronic communications and record keeping will simplify things, but the reality is proving otherwise. Businesses are hoarding information at unprecedented rates and with the ability to collect and generate increasing volumes of digital data, businesses have not simplified their information processing, they have only created a greater need.
Generating and collecting data is not the issue created, nor is ultimately the archival and storage of the information. Rather, the problem created is in organizing the work related to processing this ever-increasing volume of documents and data.
Businesses dealing with documents and transaction-based activities should not only attempt to structure workflows necessary to support the various processes, but must also seek to normalize as much as possible, developing a consistent and methodical approach to the work which results in predictable and consistently high quality service delivery.
The efficiency gained through this structuring and standardization of the work allows the professional services firm to achieve a greater level of profitability for outsourced processing engagements, which are often viewed as low-margin and low-profit activities.
Creating and keeping a competitive edge is critical to building a successful business. Developing a plan, monitoring the plan to make sure the business remains on target, and setting goals for growth and profitability are foundations of business success. But great strategy and detailed planning cannot ensure success because the economy and business environments are unpredictable; no amount of planning is a guarantee that bad things won’t happen and the business won’t experience challenges. On the other hand, regularly monitoring small business performance data can reveal trends and indications that things are not going as expected, and provide a basis for making the decisions necessary to get the business back on track and regain the competitive edge.
Business owners must be prepared to make adjustments as conditions change, acting on decisions made based on business performance data. Whilebusiness analytics are more important than ever, with businesses facing volatility in financial markets and increasingly globalized competition, finding a way to approach the matter is often the biggest barrier. The growing difficulty – the increasingly expanding problem facing business owners and their advisors – can be distilled down to three particularly noticeable trends.
The volume of data flowing into organizations is already high and is increasing.
The data is complex
The data lacks similarity (data is disparate)
The volume of information flowing in to businesses is already high, and is increasing steadily. With all the data collection applications and tools available, and as the business seeks to gain more information and intelligence from more sources, the volume of information gathered by businesses has increased at astounding rates. Technology has adapted to this need, allowing businesses to gather than store vast amounts of data. To be of value, however, the data must be analyzed tofind the answers to questions posed. What technology is only now beginning to address is the complex and disparate nature of the collected data. Coming from varying sources and in equally varying formats, data must be “normalized” and related for it to make much sense.
More Users
More business decision makers in more job roles and functions are getting involved
More people approaching the problem with their own “brand” of analysis
In a very small business, decisions are generally made by the owner. This is most often due to the fact that the owner is the person who not only knows what’s going on in the business, but is generally the one doing a lot of the work. As businesses grow and bring in personnel to manage various functions, these managers become decision-makers. Decisions are made in businesses at all levels, and as management layers are compressed, those “closer to the action” are being handed more responsibility for the decisions impacting their areas. Without a comprehensive and company-wide framework for data analysis and reporting, these individuals and workgroups find ways to capture and analyze the data they feel is pertinent to their requirement and within their own realm.
Less Time
Timeframe for making decisions is shrinking, and is shrinking at an “alarming” rate
The “velocity” (rapidity of motion) of business is increasing
It may be that, in some businesses and markets, certain decisions don’t have to be made with any great speed. Businesses or markets of this type are tough to find these days because the Internet, information technology and connected systems have all but eliminated the effects of time and distance. Just about everything in business today moves at a rapid pace, and that means that business decisions are often demanded on-the-spot, providing little time for detailed consideration and working through the problem. Without the tools and data providing meaningful real-time visibility into business performance, decision-makers may be able to act fast but not wisely, and are most frequently guided by their “gut feel” as to what the right move is.
Driving Small Business Analytics
Business decision makers are now recognizing the need to know more about the business and how it is operating and competing in order to effectively address the choices and decisions faced each day. The cause for this recognition may be due to variable elements, but the conclusion reached was the same: good business decisions require business analytics to support them.
Not surprising was the report finding – that the majority of small business owners felt pressured to adopt a business analytics solution primarily due to the fact that “critical business decisions rely too much on “gut feel”. Surprise! Other drivers listed were lack of visibility into operational metrics, the growing number of people in the business who want analytical capability, the business’s inability to identify and act upon business opportunities, and having less time to make decisions.
Steps to Get There
As with any business project, there are “degrees of success”, and the ultimate success of a business initiative requires that all parties be on board with it. Businesses who recognize a need to improve their analytical capability, but who do not then empower their systems, processes and people, will not achieve the same result as those who do.
Focusing on the business data, it is important to address both the volume and disparity by creating formal data management practices and policies, and implementing systems and processes which assist with the intelligent capture and storage of business information. Simply retaining the data is not useful; it must be presented and applied in a meaningful manner for it to become useful as decision-supporting information. The value of the information increases dramatically when it becomes truly useful to the business. Additionally, by empowering a broader framework for data collection and analysis, businesses extend the “intelligence” to others in the organization, supporting individual and workgroup efforts to make better decisions for their respective areas of responsibility. Of course, if the information is not provided in a timely manner, its value is reduced if not eliminated (hindsight may be 20/20, but that doesn’t help you see where you going to step next). Any approach to building business intelligence should leverage connectivity and integration to provide a timely delivery of complete information how and when it is needed.
What’s the Proven Benefit?
source: article
The obvious benefit of business analysis is that business owners are provided with data to help them understand more about the business operational and financial performance. The real and proven benefit is that the information provides a basis for gaining insight into trends and conditions which impact performance, and which support making the necessary decisions which facilitate improvement in various business areas.
The highest level of proven benefit, according to the Aberdeen Group report, was achieved by those businesses who embraced the requirement to know more about the organization and operation, and who implemented a focused effort at building business intelligence.
Fast Facts: Best-in-Class SMBs Achieved 24% year over year increase in new customer accounts sold compared to 12% for the industry average, and 11% for the laggards.
These organizations which achieved the greatest improvement operated from real data rather than being guided by gut and emotion, enabled the entire organization to participate in the development of organizational and business intelligence, positioned themselves to identify and act on new business and market opportunities, and ensured that those who must make decisions have the information and insightful data to support making the right ones.
The Trend Is Up For Single-Family Housing Market
Extending workflows to embrace mobile workers and remote offices is the next step to developing an efficient anytime/anywhere business. 92 percent of U.S. construction executives believe that technology will fundamentally change their businesses, and help them bridge the performance gap, according to KPMG’s Make it, or break it – Global Construction Survey 2017 report.
J
Cooper Mann Consulting 