Automating your business

Remember the promise that computers were going to release us from drudgery? It’s happening at last, in the form of automating crucial but not exactly thrilling business tasks. And, another promise, it’s going to get better!

In any business there are some jobs that are simply not interesting, but are essential. Order entry, invoice processing, and updating catalogues can be tedious and time-consuming, but remain essential to the function of any business.

So why not automate them? In most cases the software is already there, and numerous tasks that once fell to pen, paper, and a calculator, have been coded into software and mass marketed to business. What started with accounting and payroll has moved on into human resources, supply chain and logistics, and sales force and customer relationship management (CRM).

For most businesses, large and small, it would not be conceivable to operate without at least some of these software technologies in place to take the pain out of running the business.

For a simple example of software-based automation, think about a giftware company that operates a sales website. Obviously the website needs to be filled with products and offers. By linking the site to the company’s inventory and order management system, that information can now be published to the web in automatic real-time. Customers can see when a listed product is out of stock or on order, and the website operator has also saved the cost of having someone manually enter that information.

Automation in sales and customer management can mean that customer information can be captured into a single system (rather than the head and notepad of the client rep). So it is on call for anyone dealing with that customer, and is not lost when the sales rep leaves the company. By monitoring sales patterns across customers it is also possible to identify up-sell opportunities and have these automatically raised.

Cost & Complexity

According to the Michele Caminos, a New Zealand-based vice president of research at the technology analyst company Gartner, the cost of software-based automation for a smaller company is really no greater than that for a larger one. Both parties will still see the final bill determined by the cost and complexity of the applications they choose, and of course the number of workers using them.

In fact, Caminos says Gartner’s research shows that SMEs spend, on average, a higher percentage of their revenue on IT than larger organisations—approximately nine percent.

A key factor for determining the success of a software automation exercise is taking the time required to match the software’s capabilities to the business and its goals. “This can be time-consuming, and may even leave some SMEs feeling like they have had to ‘settle’ for the solution they did choose,” Caminos says. “More and more software vendors are offering a ‘mass-customised’ approach to their applications, which enables quick selection of feature requirements for that business so they can tailor it more to their organisation.”

Mass customisation helps, but Caminos says business must still heed the time required to implement and train employees in the new automated processes. “This will not go away and has to be done properly otherwise the full benefits of the application will take longer to realise,” she says.

For the Queensland-based air conditioning and refrigeration services company Jackson & Jackson, using Microsoft’s Dynamics software technology to automate businesses processes has been essential in supporting the company’s growth from its foundation in December 2006 to around 40 people today.

Manager Kirsty Dunsmore says from the beginning Jackson & Jackson’s founders were careful to select an application suite that would grow with the business. She had previously worked with another large system and was familiar with the benefits that such systems can deliver for managing a business, particularly as the company would be dealing with contracts valued upwards of $1 million.

She now rates the software as instrumental in helping the company grow from $3.5 million in revenue a year ago to $8.5 million now.

“The learning curve for our administration staff has been absolutely enormous, but they have coped with it, and because of the ease-of-use of the program they have been able to grow with it,” Dunsmore says.

Jackson & Jackson is now looking to use software to automate other areas of the business, such as stock and inventory management. “We carry huge inventory, and we are not managing that in the most efficient manner,” Dunsmore says. “It is still half manual, so our next push is to get up to speed in an automated sense from ordering of goods to receiving of goods and right through to the using of the goods.”