How healthy is YOUR business? George Petri dons his white coat and stethoscope to offer this timely advice, which might just put your business into tip-top condition…
When I got my first management position, my manager advised me to imagine a business as a living organism. Why? Because businesses - like people - can be healthy or sick, fit or underperforming, obese or malnourished…
Let me take the analogy further, starting with sales = food.
Don’t consume enough and the body/business becomes malnourished, unable to function fully. Gorge on the wrong foods and you put on the paunch that slows your response time and physical speed. Like any well-honed athlete, businesses need enough of the right intake: sales nourish the corporate body.
Now we’ve started down this track, let me extend the metaphor even further.
Bodies depend on “information systems” – just like every business. Just as you depend upon the brain telling your nerves to get your muscles moving, if the right information is not being passed to management then the “muscles” in your business don’t do their job properly.
Equally, every part of your body needs to report back to the brain on what it has achieved and how it feels. That way, the brain can compensate for or learn from any failures or problems. Or, if what you wanted to happen has worked well, it can repeat the movement. Again, every business must have this ready two-way flow of commands and responses…
So how do the “bodies” of a “good business” and a “bad business” compare?
A poor business with weak management will probably be sending out the wrong messages at the wrong time… and quite possibly sending different messages to different departments – even using different IT systems or software. There may well be lots of activity going on, but it’s uncoordinated, so the business feels like it’s trying to go in two directions at once.
Like a healthy body with its central nervous system and single server (the brain!), a fully functioning business will have a single information processing system – one that everyone is plugged into. So why do businesses need so many different systems?
In most businesses I go to, I find the situation where at least three systems are being used - if not more - for customer facing activities alone, i.e. CRM, help desk, quotation and proposal generation, workflow, etc. The glue between the systems happens to be human intervention, e.g. exporting, importing information from one system to another, or worse still re-typing information into the second system that already exists in the first.
All parts of the business have to be in unison, and therefore disparate systems make it hard for this to happen. Worse still, is that the common goal of a healthy business based on happy customers can be jeopardised. The sales organ is functioning well, but the customer service organ is struggling to keep up with customer demand.
As long as they are working independently, or there is very little interaction between them, then at some point you will have an unhappy customer.
This can be averted by having the minimum of systems involved, with data shared as needed, and the ability for everyone to access up-to-the-minute information as and when required – not least the MD.
There is a way forward: an organisational management system, at the heart of which is the process builder that allows each organisation to implement and maintain the various processes that make the business effective and efficient. No more silos of sales, marketing, and customer service.
Personnel from sales, marketing, and customer service can all be involved in a process - whether it is to do with the sales function, operations functions, of customer service function. This approach allows for a very strong focus on the customer and what is being done to maintain a happy customer - which in turn maintains a healthy business.
An organisational management system cuts out the need to have disparate systems because it addresses process, quotation and proposal generation, workflow, compliance, knowledgebase, document management, CRM, and business intelligence.
The question is: how do you smoothly move from having a number of disparate systems towards a centralised, shared organisational management system? More to follow….
