How many times have you heard ‘We have always done it that way’ – my guess, is far too many!
It could possibly be the most damaging sentence ever heard in business. If your business suffers a major data breach through cyber attack you are not going to say oh well ‘we have always done it that way’ you are going to make changes and pretty fast. You won’t hear a football club after being relegated saying ‘We have always done it that way’ and we always will – No, they will make changes – usually sacking the manager is the first reaction.
Why do we not embrace change?
So my next question is why is it, that businesses are quite happy to continue to do things the way they always have? Albert Einstein said ‘If you do always do what you have always done, you will always get what you’ve always got’ So if something isn’t working change it.
We see this all the time when it comes to business processes. They are slow and inefficient but because they work, we keep doing it. Does it really matter if an order takes 2 days to process? Well yes, if you process it in one day, you get paid a day earlier and all of sudden your cash flow is a lot better. That could be the difference between survival or not. Very rarely do efficient companies go out of business. If it takes 2 days to process a purchase order then the whole process is held up by a day. The purchase order could be for a piece of essential kit that has broken and needs to be replaced. That knock on effect could take weeks to catch up and cost your business significantly.
I could go on, but I am sure you the gist? At the moment, in the UK we seem to be very lethargic and this is coming from the top down. We could all blame Brexit and I am sure we will. But the whole process has taken its toll on the country. There seems to be a general opinion that if the politicians can’t be bothered why should we. So nothing is getting done.
What can we do?
Day to day business goes on, yes, we may not know what is going to happen long term. However short term, we can only keep doing our jobs. For management, that means looking at ways to improve the way we do business. Moving data around the business is key to this. We all like to save some money. If your business is busy, change is difficult! If you are quiet, maybe don’t have the will or the money. This means you have to do this when times are good. I appreciate that the change process can be time-consuming and sometimes business can be affected whilst you are changing things. However, in the long run, you will save money and become more efficient.
Unleashed have been working with businesses trying to improve IT and the general data flow since our inception. Last year we partnered with Kissflow and it has proved to be one of the best moves we made. Kissflow is a workflow management tool. It sits between CRM/ERP and your financial packages such as Sage, Xero or Quickbooks. This means we can take data from CRM and pre-populate a form and when complete, define workflow and then store the document in whatever system you have.
Unleashed can help
Kisssflow, is very cost effective, will not disrupt daily business and has over 50 pre-populated workflow documents, or you can design your own in minutes.
For more details go to our digital transformation section or to see other services visit our website.
If you are old fashioned and like to speak to a real live person then please call us on 0333 240 0565 or you can contact us here