how integrated software - clarity software · how integrated software systems generate more profit...

How Integrated Software Systems Generate More Profit

Get huge returns by joining up your online and offline processes

white paper

www.clarity-software.com© Clarity Software 2012 How Integrated Software Systems Generate More Profit

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Call +44 (0)121 248 2448 or email [email protected]

Section 1 – Introduction

Section 2 – Your current processes

Section 3 – Integration : more profit

Section 4 – Preparing for deployment

Section 5 – More than just an MIS

Section 6 – Retaining more margin

Section 7 – Playing to your strengths

Section 8 – FAQs

Section 9 – Summary

Contents

Section 1: Introduction

In these tough economic times all business processes and costs need to be scrutinised for their contribution to the profit of your company.

Margins are being squeezed by the competition and by material suppliers. Pressure is on to deliver jobs within the estimated budget, and the temptation is there to take on opportunities that you would normally run a mile from.

Business software can help. It’s proven to. 100% of Clarity customers who responded to a survey testified to becoming more efficient after implementing their MIS system. A perfect score that unquestionably confirms its value.

The devil is in the detail in any successful business and software helps unearth those assumptions, manual tasks, approximations and unnecessary overheads that eat away at your hard-earned profit margins.

With the right software you can protect your profits with traceable automated processes that improve your accuracy, reduce your costs and guarantee unrivalled service quality for your customers.

The good news is that with today’s software technology it’s simple to do, and the cost is easily calculated to give you return on investment, even in the immediate term.

In 2012 there are a number of ways to access business software, making it more convenient to use and always there for you.

Some systems are based online, giving you the option to use handheld devices such as smart phones and tablets, whereas others are installed on your personal computer.

But the real key for generating the most financial return from your software is to join your systems together. Get your front-to-back processes working seamlessly and you will reap the rewards in margin increases, adding new profits to your bottom line.

In this White Paper we will help you understand how you can integrate and develop your business systems to win more orders, make more margin from your jobs and thrive in the current market.

Why software systems are crucialto thriving in the current economic climate

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Section 2: Your current processes

When you are looking to integrate and develop your systems the best place to start is to analyse your current way of working.

Prior to implementation we speak to our customers and challenge their processes to prioritise the value they have in their day-to-day operations. We call this a Business Process Review (BPR), and it forms an essential foundation for ensuring our customers’ costs are reduced, problems are solved and performance targets are exceeded.

Depending on its size and complexity, there can be a number of incumbent software systems in a business which often do not talk to each other.

They could all be valuable in their own right but must now be considered as part of a combined bigger picture to ensure maximum efficiency and competitiveness in today’s tough market. Here we’ve put together a check list of just a few example factors to consider when evaluating your current online, offline, cloud and mobile processes.

If you find some of these questions uncover an issue then you should consider the effectiveness of your workflow and how you can plug the holes using joined up software.

You may have satisfactory systems in isolation but simple checks soon reveal that profit could be leaking from your business.

Evaluating and assessing your current online, offline & mobile systems

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- What’s our most profitable product to manufacture and sell? Do we promote it?

- Do we always secure the target margin on our jobs and were our estimates accurate?

- Is my website updated with the latest product information? Am I capturing leads and following them up immediately?

- How much information is NOT documented by employees, being managed privately on spread sheets or kept in their heads?

- If individuals are unavailable can I still access all of my business information?

- Can I improve performance by offering online system access to my sales and onsite staff?

- Is the same business information entered into multiple systems repeatedly?

- Do my sales team have visibility of key customer accounting information to help them minimise our exposure on deals?

- Are all our quotations consistent? Can I confidently say that everyone in the sales team uses the same price list?

- Can I find the answer to any commercial question I wish to ask my business?

Section 3: Integration : more profit

One of the most powerful innovations at Clarity Software that encompasses the cloud is providing total integration of software systems.

Nowadays, sign makers, printers and other job-based companies need to know exactly what’s happening right across their business, regardless of where they are or what time of day it is.

By aligning all online and offline workflow processes and synchronising them together through the cloud, Clarity is able to give companies business-critical visibility of their operations in real time and with access from their smart phone, tablet and PC devices.

But the ultimate benefit is not returned in the ability to access information. It’s delivered in hard cash.

FuelReduce unnecessary travelling back to the office to collect paperwork only to find out that your next job is around the corner from your current location

Phone calls Eliminate calls to multiple members of staff for numbers, site locations, documents and job references

WorkflowSave on inspection, error rework and monitoring resources using an automated artwork and production workflow

Labour Eradicate repeat entry tasks and save hours by logging information outside of the office using smart, cloud-based connections

RiskTake the worry out of your cash flow projections by producing accurate credit data so you can sell to customers who pay on time

SalesFurnish your sales team with up-to-date prices, qualified customer criteria and multiple ways to close higher margin deals faster than ever before

Time Get cash into the business quicker through seamless order processing and reduced work in progress times

It’s clear to see that businesses can make more profit on their jobs by integrating online and offline workflows using real-time synchronisation.

How joined up software systemsincrease your bottom line profit

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One System

Any proposed changes to your business workflow will understandably generate a mixture of comments and feedback from your employees, depending on their job roles.

Don’t be put off - these will be essential to the success of your plan and should be considered carefully, even if they appear to be negative.

Integrating your employees is the keyWith the best will in the world, no owner or manager can expect to know every square millimetre of their business.

One of the immediate benefits of installing MIS and CRM software is to give 360 degree visibility.

Departments that have historically worked autonomously can now be included in group plans and results, increasing overall accuracy in measuring true costs and profit margins.

Most employees rightfully react positively to this change, welcoming a reliable foothold to work from and being able to see the influence their hard work has to the company’s success.

However, a minority may see it as an encroachment of trust and an attempt to expose any personal performance issues.

But they will soon realise this isn’t the agenda. Before implementing and joining your website, software systems and other applications, everyone in the company needs to be aware of the big picture so a seamless and smooth transition can be made.

Being able to share data is criticalTimes have changed. We are now in a modern age where sharing information across multiple media platforms is essential for making real-time business decisions. And if you’re not making fast decisions, you’re losing opportunities.

Your business must adopt the ‘unified’ mindset. No longer can your teams work in isolation, they are each a component of an all-powerful engine with one common objective of business growth.

Once that mindset is established, your systems will glue it all together, with information pushing and pulling in all directions using online and offline technology. Just think about the radical improvements you can immediately make:

- New website visitors feeding into your MIS- Marketing campaigns based on targeted criteria- Sales teams processing their orders out on site- Customer emails triggered by shop floor activity- Customers seeing the progress of orders online- Site photos & sign-off signatures arriving instantly- Sales notified of all new enquiries as they happen

All of this is easy with an integrated business. And the possibilities are endless...

Section 4: Preparing for deployment

Getting your business readyfor an integrated way of working

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Make no mistake, the core principles of making a business more profitable will always apply. They just evolve in the way they present themselves.

In 2012, a business that relies solely on offline processes simply cannot compete on service with companies who can respond to enquiries instantly.

Similarly, a business that has no visibility of whether their deliveries have been made, their installations have been completed or their products have been despatched are operating more on assumption rather than assurance.

A modern business system can eliminate fear, uncertainty and doubt in all customer-facing and back office processes. It joins up each department and the specialist tools they use to make one, all-powerful infrastructure that drives efficiency and profits.

The importance of integrated web marketing Can you remember where your customers were originally sourced from?

Just a few years ago the list of lead sources might have contained a few primary campaigns that were mainly offline activities. In 2012, it’s a completely different story.

Just take a look at this list of web and digital lead sources which are standard in many companies these days (which is not exhaustive):

- Display advertising (banners)- Pay Per Click advertising (e.g. AdWords)- Website remarketing- Referral links- Search engine optimisation (SEO)- Blogsites- Forums- Site sponsorships- Mobile phone adverts- Email marketing- Webinars- Content and news website articles- Video advertising (e.g. YouTube)- Apple and Android mobile apps- Facebook and Twitter- Surveys- Reciprocal website links- Podcasts- Competitions

How many of these do you understand? How many of these are you doing? And can you track the results in your MIS system, knowing whether they are returning a profit or not?

When you stop for a few minutes and absorb these campaign activities, you’ll probably realise how often you respond to these yourself in your personal life.

That means they work - and it’s a massive part of the marketing mix for any business with serious growth ambitions.

If you aren’t marketing online already, you really need to start doing it now. And the right software makes it a whole lot easier.

Section 5: More than just an MIS

Embrace the opportunityof a modern CRM, MIS and workflow system

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It’s fair to say that a major proportion of customers now expect to be able to browse, order and purchase commodity goods online.

For you, it’s about giving them a choice.

If they are busy and miss your office hours, or don’t have your catalogue to hand, they can jump on your website from wherever they are and place orders through your web store.

By offering this online product placement choice you’re now:

- Opening up a new sales channel- Retaining customer business- Fighting off competitors who have web stores- Creating a fast mechanism for closing orders- Competing with the best retailers on the market- Capturing targeted new leads into your database- Able to roll out targeted online promotions- Implementing more automated processes

One point of data entry is the winning formulaDepending on your business type or product focus, you may have a few, many or thousands of items that you are selling on a regular basis.

To operate at maximum efficiency and minimise staff intervention you need to be entering price and product information in just one place.

Imagine the time you would expense adding and updating products in your MIS and then repeating the whole process in your website CMS (content management system). Not ideal at all.

Connecting your website with your core MIS, CRM and Marketing systems gives you the potential to synchronise all your price list items in real time. It’s a huge step forward and will add significant gains to your bottom line, both in sales profit and efficiency savings.

Being able to showcase and sell online is an essential component for ongoing growth

Section 5: More than just an MIS (cont.)

Building & linking website storesto add new sales revenue streams

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No longer do estimators, quoters and direct sales people need to constantly go back to the office to carry out their tasks.

It’s time to work on the move.

Internet-based or ‘cloud’ software is accessible using a secured https web browser such as Google Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer.

It’s normally hosted on a remote server and gives access to authorised users by requesting an email address and password to log in.

This means as long as you have a good broadband, 3G or Wi-Fi connection you can access your contacts, log activities and close deals from wherever you are in the world, and at whatever time of day or week that suits you.

iPad? Laptop? Android phone? No problem As cloud software is accessed via an internet browser, you can log in to the system using smart phones, tablets, laptops and netbooks, giving you total personal flexibility in your working life.

On implementing cloud-based software you see immediate investment returns that have a completely unlimited timescale for delivering

measurable business results:

- Receiving leads as they come in- Following up enquiries faster- Eliminating the competition- Being smarter with site visits and sales activity- Having up-to-date information at your fingertips- Confirming deals at the customer site- Getting payment straight away

The power of quoting alongside customers Being able to quote and confirm jobs whilst you’re sat next to a customer is invaluable. It’s a win:win situation.

Once you produce your initial quote you can discuss it openly there and then, creating new revisions if required, checking that all job items are in stock and delivery is feasible on time.

For you, this saves in time, admin and potentially fuel, as it often removes the need to revisit the customer to re-present and confirm the quote.

For your customers, they receive a personalised and efficient service from a company that is transparent and willing to commit face-to-face. This wins business.


Cloud-based CRM and quotingmeans you can win business anywhere, anytime

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Over the last 3 years in particular there has been an explosion in applications for mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.

With a huge proportion of workers now owning a compatible mobile device, using native apps is an efficient and convenient way to carry out your daily tasks, and there’s no sign of it letting up.

Can an app change my working life?As with any business product or service, an app must have clear, tangible benefits for the user; otherwise, it becomes a ‘looks nice’ product that will just sit in a web store without any downloads. But build an app with a distinct purpose, a measurable return and an abiity to share data with your central system and suddenly you have the opportunity to increase your bottom line.

Managing site deliveries and installationsMany printers, sign makers and other businesses that perform site operations should spot this potential and adopt it as early as possible for their field-based team.

Using a mobile app, workers can record and track their progress at the customer site and feed back the data via 3G or Wi-Fi to the central MIS in the office.

App users automatically receive information relating to the job in their to-do list. These can include contact details, PDF documents and location details, with the ability to navigate to the site using the device’s maps app with geo-location features enabled.

They can take photographs of the job using the on-board camera and capture sign-off signatures on the device once jobs are completed, sending everything back to the office instantly.

Imagine the savings this will make in fuel, time, administration and labour alone.

And that’s not taking into account the incredible enhancements to your customer service, which drives new referrals and repeat business.

Selected and integrated carefully, mobile apps can reduce variable costs, increase staff morale and make you more profitable.


Using Apple & Android mobile appsto capture and sync critical field-based data

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Marginal gains.

Never has this phrase been more significant than in relation to MIS and integrated software systems.

Just the smallest enhancements can make all the difference to your bottom line. They could make more your workflow more efficient, improve your delivery turnaround time or speed up your quoting and estimating processes, which all contribute to a leaner operation.

But where do you find them? How do you know if something can be improved?

There are a number of ways to spot a potential modification and a good place to start is by mapping out your basic processes.

The simple image below illustrates a business which is doing all the right things but is hitting brick walls in process automation:

Just by looking at it in this way you can see the obvious improvements that can be made here using an integrated system.

Release your workflowImagine the immediate release in workflow if you knocked down the two brick walls and joined up your front and back-end processes. It will breathe fresh air into your business and remove the mundane activities that create a bottleneck.

Consider the marginal gains you can make through saving on daily direct and indirect costs:

- Time and resource re-entering data- Time delays in following up enquiries- Human errors made through manual entry- Material costs through accurate quoting- Time spent creating job cards and schedules- Fuel, admin and time costs out in the field

And don’t forget, your cash flow improves due to a much quicker overall turnaround time.

Section 6: Retaining more margin

Take short, simple steps forwardand retain even more profit in your jobs

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WEBSITE VISITORS

BRICK WALL 1

EMAIL MARKETING

SEMINAR LEADS

BRICK WALL 2

ESTIMATING

SALES

ORDERPROCESSING

ACCOUNTSSOFTWARE

PRODUCTIONSCHEDULING

DELIVERY &INSTALLATION

Section 7: Playing to your strengths

Confidence spreads right from the directors and management team through to the workforce once you know that all your systems are connected.

Suddenly, decisions that were previously conjectured - or at least came with an element of guesswork - can now be made based on the latest true facts from all reaches of the business.

Having total integration empowers all team members to analyse their collective results and combine them to formulate new growth objectives that propel the business to a new level.

No more fingers in the wind. Now you can make accurate predictions.

Are we focusing on the right products?Customers of Clarity often re-position or even diversify once they are able to analyse their integrated data.

For instance, companies that have historically relied on specialised wide-format print jobs as

their bread and butter might realise that the percentage growth returns are greater in the pull-up display volume business.

Analyse business-wide data and build more profitable strategies

This doesn’t mean they will scrap their wide-format services but it could point to a greater investment in pull-up display marketing.

To thrive in the current market you need to be selling the products that your customers are interested in buying and are prepared to pay the right price for.

It’s no good selling the ones you enjoy doing. That’s not going to make you successful.

Everybody is in business to make a profit and if you see a trigger for earning more, you would be foolish to ignore it. Follow the money!

Why you should aim higheras soon as your integration is in place

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Q1: How many providers should I approach at when building an integrated system?A: The ideal scenario for any business is to have as few providers as possible. If you need support, you only have one number to call, rather than being passed on by each provider you speak to as they deny personal responsibility for issues. However, getting your business issues solved is the most important driver and ultimately governs your decision.

Q2: What about products? A: MIS and CRM systems are constantly evolving, providing new ways of working and meeting the demands of industries as they develop. You could spend weeks - sometimes months - researching, viewing and discussing how many and what systems would be ideal for you. But the secret is to stick to your key priorities and consider it as an all-in-one solution.

- Is the core MIS system right for my industry type- Can the integrated systems technically synchronise data with my MIS- Does each of my departments get the detail they need without huge compromises- Does it make my team mobile and flexible- Do they work on my existing IT equipment or do I need to change or buy more- Do they give me the scalability to develop as my business grows Q3: Should I go for online or offline software?A: There are a number of different languages and platforms used in software and web development, with each provider having their own preference. Online web-based software is

easier to refresh and update with new versions, giving access from anywhere with an internet connection and incredible flexibility for users. It’s also essential for online marketing and sales activity. Installed software using local servers and desktop PCs on your premises arguably provides more security, as it requires full network access to be granted first rather than just an email address and password on the internet. At Clarity Software we offer a choice depending on the customer preference, with a hybrid solution often proving the most appropriate but once again it depends on your individual solution.

Q4: I’m not the greatest when it comes to computers. How will I cope with all these systems working around me?The simple answer is good training. Never underestimate the rewards of investing in a solid grounding for all your staff. It yields a faster return on investment and a happier workforce. And to make life easier, good systems should have tutorial videos and in-built help topics available to guide you.

Section 8: FAQs

The most common questionsasked by our customers

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Q5: I’m concerned about the level of support I’m going to receive from my providers. I’ve got a business to run!A: It’s so important to ensure your provider will give you the hand-holding support you need as you skill up on your systems. You can’t be left alone and have your provider move onto the next customer once you’ve signed off your training. Make enquiries regarding their telephone and online support services. Ask if you have an account manager allocated to you and whether there are any Webinars or customer workshops you can be involved in. Good providers will have these in place so you are always being contacted with useful, educational information.

Q6: Once I’ve had training, can I just switch on and start using my new system?A: On top of your initial training we strongly recommend that you invest in phase 2 and maybe even phase 3 workshop sessions so that you are really getting the most from your investment. In our experience, once customers have their phase 2 training their skills advance to a whole new level and are able to deploy new efficiencies in their business which makes the cost of training a no-brainer.

Q8: Significant change - isn’t this a bit risky?A: Implementing change in a business must be well planned and taken seriously. There will be an impact on your staff in particular, with a minority seeing it as negative, especially if they have been working in the same role using the same system day in, day out for a considerable length of time.

BUT without taking steps forward such as these, you will restrict the opportunity for growth in your business and see your competitors go past you as the introduce modern, business-winning systems that make their working lives so much easier. It is a leap of faith but one which pays huge dividends if planned correctly.

Section 8: FAQs (cont.)

The most common questionsasked by our customers

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Every business needs to find new ways to generate more sales and retain more profit.

Integrated software systems are proven to play a massive role in making this happen.

Take a moment to evaluate just some of the fundamental benefits of installing software, mobile and web systems and how they empower you to grow:

- Visibility- Organisation- Speed- Accuracy- Efficiency- Communication- Automation- Professionalism

Then consider their financial impact on your overall business profit:

- Increased sales- Paperless office- Time savings- Lower costs- Less wastage- Higher margins- Streamlined service- Accurate quotes- Easy decisions

With over 23 established years in the MIS, CRM and business software industry Clarity Software can help make these financial returns a reality.

Call +44 (0) 121 248 2448 for an impartial chat or visit www.clarity-software.com to find out more.

Section 9: Summary

Low costs, high marginsand a stress-free working life

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http://www.clarity-software.com

http://www.clarity-software.com

how integrated software - clarity software · how integrated software systems generate more profit...

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