Are you a business owner?  Is your main goal for this year is to scale your business?  Do you know which tools and information you need to achieve your desired growth?  There are many ways you can scale your business but having a proper foundation to propose to potential investors is always the best way to start.  This is where having the right data available becomes crucial to your next stages.  With proper use of data, you can accelerate your growth and hit all your business goals.

Pretty much all business owners agree on the importance of data and using it efficiently, but research shows that only 43% of small businesses use data for business decisions.

Traditionally, a young company looking to scale and gain insights using their data would be costly and very time consuming.  It could even lead to mistakes being made due to the vast amount of data which had to be processed.

Now, however, this is not something business owners need to worry about.  Using an ERP system, like Netsuite, does all the hard work for you and provides you with real time data at the touch of a button.

If you still aren’t convinced that using your data is beneficial to your business, we’ve put together some benefits of using an ERP system to manage your data and scale your business quickly and reliably.

 

Increase Your Productivity

A broken internal process can be the difference between scaling successfully or not.  Without data, it would be difficult to predict how the processes will affect the scalability.

Data can allow you to view all of your processes to fix any broken links or to inform you that in order to scale you must hire more staff.

E-Commerce businesses, for example, have many back-end processes that enable them to deliver to their customers.  This includes stocking warehouses, inventory management, tracking shipments etc.  These separate activities are additional data points that also become potential bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks have a direct impact on customer satisfaction as well as slowing down your internal processes.  They also limit your ability to scale as they can prevent you from increasing your production on a larger scale or they can even stop you from taking on new customers.

With data insights, you can recognise the bottlenecks and then dig deeper to discover the reason behind the problems.  The data can then make you more proactive in mitigating issues.  This then means that challenges can be resolved quickly and effectively.

Analysing each stage of the selling process and every interaction with your customers allows you to gain a better view of any obstacles.  In turn, this means you can work on processes that make your service as efficient as possible.

If you then share the data across departments it can strengthen your teams productivity.  When everyone has access to the same data it becomes a lot easier for teams to communicate and collaborate.

 

Personalise Your Customers’ Experience

Data unlocks insights about your customers.  From what they think and what they like, to what they require from your products and services.

These recommendations draw from a wide variety of data points, such as local inventory, previous orders, popular selections and even seasonal trends.

To provide real value to customers more consistently, businesses can use ERP solutions.  The ERP systems are a way of recognising their regular customers’ buying habits and can reward them for their loyalty.

An example of this could be a clothes retailer using an ERP system to identify customers who purchase a lot of hats.  Once identified, they could be sent an email allowing them to pre-order a new hat that’s coming out and even providing them with a discount code.

Without the use of the ERP system, the business would not have such easy access to this data meaning that they would be less likely to receive these offers.

Using data to deliver touches of personalisation allows you to go beyond the one-to-one experience that takes place in a customer’s journey.  AI lets you adapt everything from emails to website displays meaning you can personalise at scale to make a greater impact on your customers.

 

Scaling Doesn’t Mean Spending

For many, scaling your business can seem expensive, particularly if you need to hire more staff or start using new processes to manage the increase.

Conversely, growing a business means committing more resources to gain more revenue.  Scaling, therefore, is about increasing revenue without committing an equal amount in resources.  This allows you to boost profits alongside the growth of your business.

The issue for entrepreneurs is that they believe an increase in spending equals an increase in revenue.  This, however, is not the case and could even lead to profits remaining stationary or even declining.

A deep dive into data can help you unearth wastage – such as expense – or can help identify ways to reach your profit growth goals without the need of large financial investment.

ERP solutions will provide you with data that helps eradicate wasteful spending and avoids unnecessary expenses.  This in run will vastly improve your business’s cashflow while scaling.  Ultimately, your company will remain financially stable at this important stage of growth.

Using an ERP system like NetSuite will allow you to make the most of your data.  These data insights will provide you with the tools and the appropriate insights that will help you grow your business faster, smarter, and more reliably.

 

At Cofficient, we’re experts at implementing NetSuite to suit all of your business needs.  To boost your growth, contact us today.