Are you digital enough (Article 6)

Dear MSME owner - Do you know where your money is going?

In your factory, you are handling too many things – right?

As an owner, you need to have knowledge of many things in your factory, perhaps on daily basis. There are many such things that you would love to have, but in a summarized and most preferably, in a graphical form.

Are you getting facts on table?

We can imagine a few things that you would love to get ‘factually’ on a ‘month on month’ manner. And if you can get these on a ‘day to day’ manner, it would perhaps be the dream coming true!

Here we go…

1)    What is the percentage of on-time delivery for my company? 

2)    What is the order booking each day?

3)    What is the inventory level today?

4)    What is the payment collection from my customers?

5)    What is the factual gross margin on the goods that we produced today?

6)    What is a lowest and highest unit selling price of a product we offered this month or this year? What is the average unit selling price of a product we offered this month or this year?

7)    What are the production numbers today?

8)    What are the purchase figures today?

9)    How many orders are open today for manufacturing?

10)  What is the contribution of different products in the overall sales?

11)  What is the average margin for orders placed by a customer? In fact, you may also want to know about many of the above parameters in context of the same customer.

These and many such questions are, in fact, the requirement of any owner and he / she usually struggles to get factual inputs from various teams in the organization.

Why don't we get facts?

There are many reasons… Some are:

1)    The data does not exist in a uniform manner across all departments.

2)    Many of the departments don't monitor the parameters daily

3)    The data on papers or in the computes does not match with reality, due to multiple reasons like lack of required manpower, human errors, monotony and so on

4)    The software’s used for data generation are different for different departments. For example, accounts department might be using ‘Tally’, Purchase department might be using plain ‘Excel’ and Production department might be using some ERP software….

Doing Business Intelligently

With today’s technology, it is possible to integrate all these data centers without disturbing the data and integrating it in a meaningful manner to get exactly what you want.

Imagine, you have reached office in the morning and don’t have to call anyone from any department to get updated figures of variety of the above-mentioned parameters. You just have to open your computer & see the dashboard that gives you all the eleven parameters above and even more, as you define them. All this in bar graphs, tabular formats, line diagrams, pie charts or in any other format you are comfortable with.

And it pays too...

What are the benefits for you?

1)    No struggling for data and analysis

2)    Surety of data authenticity

3)    Long meetings with different departments struggling to get the required data vanish. You and your employees get more time to do meaningful work

4)    The meetings are now held to discuss the findings of the factual analysis and how to improve the performance

5)    No more frustration over unreliable numbers and unreliable findings, due to which you never reach conclusion

6)    It becomes easy to meet mandatory legal compliance's, as you are always ready with factual data – real time and historic.

7)    Saving in time that you spend meeting your Chartered Accountant, GST Consultant and other relevant consultants who ask clean and neat data for doing their job

Where can you focus?

And the best outcome is, you can focus more time in doing things that you should be doing, such as:

1)    Development of products for future

2)    Competition analysis

3)    Making new business friends

4)    Making new associations

5)    Collaborating with appropriate partners

6)    Managing key accounts

7)    Improving operations, setting up systems using the findings of the analysis that you get

8)    Spending more time with important employees who add value to the organization

9)    ….. You can add to this list (some may also add ‘spending good time with family at home)

We feel, it is essential to streamline our business, avoid wastage of money, material and time, to stay healthy and profitable in the tough business environment today.

And it is possible.

Note: With this we end this series. Thanks for reading. Watch out for the next article on another interesting topic very soon

  

© Nitin Kirloskar