Standardisation – your key super-power when it comes to growing your business
You’ve worked hard to build your business, but how do you jump to the next level? Many companies grow by acquisition, it’s a quick way to gain new customers and new revenue, however, it can be fraught with risk for the unprepared.
One of the key acquisition risks is that the new business will be difficult to integrate with your existing operations – vital to be able to manage and assess its performance. Assimilating new employees and customers into your systems can be tricky for everyone. However, with well-defined processes already in place, backed up by robust business software, you can significantly smooth the transition for employees and customers alike.
Streamlining onboarding of new clients and employees
Having robust systems and processes in place makes it much easier to add new clients or introduce new business streams. One company, City Group Security, has managed exponential growth through company acquisition. An existing user of SmartTask’s workforce management software, the company has built on its existing processes to successfully merge three companies.
City Group incorporated each new business gradually by using workforce management software to maintain separate customer portals and logos for invoices, while keeping an overall management view. With everyone using the same system, managers had data on each of the businesses to enable informed decision making and avoid data silos. It helped to seamlessly manage the change and smooth the customer experience along the way.
City Group has also successfully extended its business to offer cleaning contracts, building on the existing systems and processes to manage staff and service operations.
Supporting operations with automated and integrated processes
A workforce management system helps you automate and streamline many operational processes, from creating rosters, recording attendance data and integrating with your payroll. Such integration can help to accurately manage and calculate holidays and extra hours to ensure more accurate employee compensation and customer invoices. Integrated payroll and billing significantly reduce queries and issues that can arise with manual reconciliation. Having pre-existing processes for managing payroll makes it that much easier to assimilate new employees, particularly at a time when staff may be wary or fearful for their future jobs – being paid accurately and on time can allay some of those concerns, helping to boost morale.
A fully integrated workforce management system can also play a significant role in customer service relationships. A customer portal that provides accurate, real-time data enables you to be completely transparent in your service delivery.
Many solutions offer ‘self-serve’ reports, which means that customers can keep fully informed, from anywhere and at any time, giving total flexibility. Automated alerts can also be built in to notify your managers (and clients) immediately of incidents as they happened. Decisions can be made quickly to rectify any issues, helping save time and money. For example, damaged perimeter fences or fire doors which could be a potential security or safety threat. Tracking where officers or operatives are, how long they spend on site enables you to provide detailed reports, which further helps to build client trust.
Clear reporting informs good decision making
Built in reporting features can help to display operations data in meaningful ways, providing complete visibility to management of individual business divisions within the group. As an example, City Group Security benefits from easy to view dashboards which display real time data. This helps operational staff to deliver consistent customer service, as well as providing the ability to compare different divisions to ensure they are running smoothly and remain profitable.
For example, the management team can drill down to view data in detail to provide snapshots of the business. Such comprehensive analytics helps them to track costs and activities and measure key performance indicators, identifying trends to make informed decisions. They can easily analyse shift attendance patterns, see where overtime might be consistently required, or assess the impact of different rostering strategies on operational efficiency.
Applying processes across the business helps to ensure standards are maintained and profitability of each client and location can be measured. Having a clear overview of how to meet KPIs and SLAs also helps with more accurate forecasts that can enhance strategic planning for growth.
If you would like to find out how workforce management software could better support your business processes and plans for growth, contact the SmartTask team today.