One of the growing concerns for businesses is how to streamline processes, increase efficiency, and improve production and profitability. Nowadays, it’s not enough to have a good product or service; businesses also need to make that product available and accessible, which means you must be customer-facing.
As businesses grow, it often becomes difficult to meet the demands of both customers and management. One way to ensure you can keep your business running smoothly is to streamline your processes. To do this, you will need to evaluate each component of your business and identify the areas that need improvement and how these improvements can be made.
Tracking billable hours from the get-go with system integration
You know the feeling. You’re working on a new project, and at the one point in your process, you think, “am I tracking the hours of this project?”
Those simple, repeatable tasks and processes are a huge time drain as you have to go back and reconfigure them for each new project. It’s even worse if you try to do it all manually or in a spreadsheet.
With system integration, you can start measuring billable hours from the first task you need to do on a project. Automatically or with the simple click of a button, you start tracking even before adding the details of a client.
With system integration, your business can also reduce data entry, having a single database for all your clients that can be accessed anywhere in the company. This is very helpful for office-based businesses like law firms and PR agencies.
Make sure you can take large orders
System integrations allow you to plan and make sure you don’t promise something and then realize there is no budget.
Your business should be able to keep up with orders; each part of your supply chain should seamlessly connect to the next step so that the right materials will arrive at the right time and location.
You must ensure that your company’s system is adaptable enough to know what you can handle – and what you can’t. Integrate your software and log orders to know when you have sold something, and integrate the ERP accounting system with CRM to know if you can fulfill large orders.
This allows you to plan huge marketing campaigns and adapt your calendar for large orders during a time of the year.
Don’t sit on a huge inventory
Foodservice companies have a considerable inventory. Even for major brands, their product is different from one store to another. This can lead to a lot of waste, but it also means that a company is focused on getting the right product to each store.
This takes a lot of work and requires people to plan, coordinate, and oversee every process step. You have to estimate food consumption in each region because they can’t keep too much food and not enough in one region. And they must ensure that there is availability at local markets — warehouses might not always be conveniently placed.
It’s not just about planning out the distribution or the logistics. Foodservice companies have to deal with many customers, from restaurant owners and chefs to individuals and managers. System integration can help you ensure your warehouse is properly staffed and that you have the right mix of food items you need for any seasonal sale. This will make sure you reduce waste.
Have an efficient employee schedule
Have you been manually entering people’s vacation requests into your Google Calendar? You can remove that wait and save time by automating this procedure.
System integration isn’t only for employee benefits; it’s also for the entire schedule. You can figure out how many staff members you’ll need at different times of the day.
The option to create and change a corporate or store schedule, including individual hours, breaks and personal days, is a great use of system integration.
System integration: Keep up with your business metrics
No matter how well you’re running your business, you always want to improve it. And if you hope to improve any aspect of your business, you need metrics and the data behind them. Creating metrics can be a challenge, and doing it manually takes time. A better, faster way is available for businesses looking to grow: a dashboard.
A dashboard is one of the most useful systems integration applications, giving you key figures, or metrics, that you need to run your business in a single, easy-to-visualize place.
System integration is a very useful and important segment of business that has helped many industries. It can help you to create the best possible experience for your customers. This, in turn, will lead to a better business because it improves your visibility. Whichever type of industry you are in—retail, hospitality, healthcare—system integration is essential. When businesses grow and expand, system integration is what will keep them going.