The key to improving business performance with custom software is keeping your team focused on what’s important, eliminating wasted time, and streamlining your processes. When you set measurable goals, track your progress, and introduce new efficiencies with your software, your business’s performance will improve. Let’s dive in a bit deeper.
The full term is Business Performance Management. In a nutshell, this means tracking important business metrics to improve your processes, products, and service. These metrics are your business’s vital signs. Also known as Key Performance Indicators, they measure the key functions of your business including Sales, Customer Service, Finances, Operations, Marketing and more.
Measuring performance through metrics tracking is just one part of the equation, though. The other is setting goals for your metrics. Set your goals and measure progress throughout the year. That is performance management. So, how does custom software help with business performance and tracking your metrics?
Once you have established the key metrics to track and have identified your targets for each metric, the real work begins -- making it happen. Custom software -- software created specifically for your business -- will help you track your metrics and improve your processes and products to help you achieve that coveted improvement in business performance. Here’s how custom software accomplishes this:
Simplification: Part of the process of designing your custom software is to go through all of your business processes -- sales, operations, customer service, finance, marketing -- and find areas where work is being repeated, is redundant. When you eliminate unnecessary steps, you simplify the business. Then, you can automate some of those steps.
Automation: Once you have combed through and simplified your processes, you’ll identify steps that can be automated, steps which are being done manually today. Automating these processes frees up your team to get other work done, creating new efficiencies.
Access: Access to data is key to performance. Information needs to flow between departments so that it’s not siloed and duplicated. You have probably experienced the effects of storing data separately in different pieces of software: incorrect and outdated data, inefficiency in waiting for data exchange, and even security issues. Centralize your data, provide access between teams and to users, and you’ll see a noticeable performance improvement.
Security: We’ve covered the importance of cyber-security. When it comes to improving performance, tight security prevents huge interruptions to your operations. A breach in security can bring everything to a halt while you figure out what happened and try to fix it. That is going to affect nearly all of your performance metrics.
Experience: Customers are the primary focus of your business and your performance. Custom software helps improve that customer experience, from regular, automated communication, to access to data and information, to ensuring the accuracy of orders and implementation. That all adds up to create a winning experience for your customers.
Information: So many businesses spend time putting data into spreadsheets, combining spreadsheets, and generating reports. When your business runs a disparate group of software solutions, that task can become extremely tedious -- and at times error-prone. Custom software can integrate your software together and generate the reports you need -- automatically -- to track your metrics.
Scale: Once you have all of your processes humming like a fine-tuned machine, business is likely to grow. The last thing you want is to outgrow your software and watch that progress grind to a halt. Your software needs to scale with your business.
The final step here is combining everything above into the analysis of your business needs. Your custom software solution provides insight into all of the changes you made to your business processes and products. That insight enables the analysis you need to keep making regular business improvements.
The right software solution enables your business to make improvements to your business performance and track the results. That means beginning with the end in mind so that you end with the end you wanted. And custom software is the foundation for making that happen. It’s time to make the decision on whether your business is ready for a custom solution.
Contact us to review your needs.