Use the Right Business Management Solution

A recent trip to Sydney reminded me how satellite navigation has changed our lives. It has removed the need for maps, making navigating large, unfamiliar cities much easier, quicker, and less stressful. It's not hard to understand why this is; from our phone or the screen in our car, we can see where we are, the route to our destination, and how long it will take to get there. We can even see areas of congestion and alternative routes.

So it occurs to me that if we can improve our travelling experience using technology, why aren't we using it to improve how we manage our flooring businesses? Many of us in the industry are like the tourist persevering in using maps;  we waste time, make bad decisions, get stressed, and we quite literally cannot know where our business is heading.

While in Sydney, we visited a client. Like all of us, over recent years, they have had to look hard at their businesses to accommodate the changing environment. They have made significant changes based on data available out of RFMS. They are using their business management system just like we used our satellite navigation app to find their store.

A reader might think I am straining the analogy between satellite navigation and business management. Maybe, but how quickly can you access financial information about last month's trading, and how does it compare to the same month the previous year? How is this month tracking? How much new business has your sales team written, and what is the value of jobs installed and invoiced this month? What's happening with margins, and are you on track to hit budget? How much work do you have in the pipeline? What information do you have when considering the direction you want the business to take?

These questions are just the tip of the data iceberg. We need access to data to make good decisions. Yet, most flooring businesses cannot access it because their business information sits in silos across numerous processes and systems that don't talk to each other; the various steps in the process of selling flooring can be highly disconnected. Worse, whenever a job moves from one process to another, information must be handled again and rekeyed into the next stage. When I talk to potential clients, the most common pain they are experiencing is handling the same information multiple times and the resulting issues when it's missed or done incorrectly.

In a true ERP solution, you enter information only once. Google tells us Enterprise Resource Planning solutions "help organisations automate and manage core business processes for optimal performance." What does that mean in a flooring business?

If you were using an ERP solution, such as RFMS, in your business, you would quantify a project in a quantifying application and export all the quantities directly into a quote. When the customer confirms, the quote would become an order from which you would generate Purchase Orders and picking tickets without ever having to reenter any aspect of the project. The same applies to the installation and invoicing stages; you only need to access the data when a change or addition is required.

You might feel that your systems suit you, and of course, that's fine. Remember, though, the most significant constriction on your business is not your entrepreneurial skills. The most common thing flooring people bump their heads against when growing their business is scaling the very manual processes they have in their business. One of the things that most significantly erodes the value of a business when it comes to selling it is those same manual systems.

Many people start the business management process with a generic financial package, which might suit a purely retail business or a tradesman. As good as they are, off-the-shelf financial packages are not designed for the complexities of a flooring business, and they don't have the operational tools needed to run a flooring business.

At RFMS, we are passionate about our clients using our software to improve their business. If you would like to see what RFMS might do for your business, we would love to show you.