Imagine you’re Christine, owner of a distribution business that you run together with your Fulfillment Manager, Larry. Every day, you’re taking customer orders and doing your best to get them out the door accurately and on time.
You know you should be spending your time working ON your business, improving it, but you spend almost all your time working IN it instead. Day after day, you and Larry are responding to customers, investigating issues, and fighting fires—there’s no time to get ahead.
Even if there weren’t endless problems getting in the way, the business runs on an ERP system that wasn’t designed or intended to help with process optimization. The data that’s available is hard to access, and gives no visibility into the work that’s being done. You could hire analysts and shell out for BI tools, but they aren’t going to be able to show you what’s going on right now. Doesn’t matter how much money you spend, you can’t visualize data that isn’t there.
Competition is stiff, margins are thin, and you know that the order process desperately needs to be optimized to speed up delivery times, improve accuracy, and handle more volume. But it’s all you can do to keep things running and stay ahead of your orders.
What you need—what is going to completely change your life—is a way to see what’s going on in your business. If you could see the way your orders were moving through the fulfillment process (or not), you and Larry would both save a lot of time on investigation. If Larry got alerts when bottlenecks or other issues started to form, it’d be much easier to get ahead of problems and keep things running smoothly. If you could see who was completing tasks efficiently (and who was entering inaccurate orders), you could help your entire team improve.
As Christine, you want your business to grow and succeed. To do that, you need to get off the operations treadmill that isn’t going anywhere, and get onto the optimization train that will take your business to the next level.
What will get you there is a system that provides a new level of operational clarity so you can make the right decisions at the right times to create the best possible outcomes for your business.
