New Years IT Resolution

Every new year's day, people make New Years Resolutions for themselves. While some are successful and others may not be, should we be looking at doing this for our business?

This year, in particular, it may be more important than any other, with the state of the economy.

When business is good, we focus on selling and satisfying our customers needs. We seldom have time to do anything else. What do we do when business slows down?

There are two things that we can do:

• Look at ways to increase sales.
• Look at ways to reduce costs.

Often both actions are taken, but not effective.

If we look at increasing sales in areas that are not profitable, we lose. Yes, we have increased sales, but perhaps at a high cost.

If we look at our current customers, those that are the most profitable for us, and see how we can increase their sales, we get a double benefit. How do we do that? We need better information about our customers and the quality of service that is being delivered. Where do we get this? We get it from our computer systems. Many businesses don't look at this information, sometimes because it is hard to retrieve. But it is there and if we dig into it, we can find a lot of information. Because sales are down, you have more time to look at improving serice. If you get better profitability from your customers, the extra cost may be worth it.

One of the first things most companies do to reduce costs is to cut staff. While that may provide some short term relief, it also weakens your company. You lose the skills that they have developed, you can provide the additional support to improve quality of your most profitable clients, and you have no basis for competing with those who do. There are many ways to reduce costs and cutting staff, although perhaps the easiest, is the least effective. If you delve into your business processes to try and improve productivity, you get a double benefit.

• You reduce cost in a way that stays with you. You are able to take advantage of it when business picks up.
• You get more time to focus on improving the quality of service and therefore you can compete more effectively, perhaps even increasing sales during a recession.

How do you get the information to do all of this? Again you get it from your computer systems. We all use software to run our business. This software is typically used only at an activity level to manage transactions. We use only a small percentage of the software that we own. There is a tremendous opportunity to increase the value that we get from this software, without buying more.

So your New Years Resolution should be to increase the return on investment from your existing software. Your company will be more profitable, not just today, but for years to come.