How to Adapt to Changing Market and Boost Growth by Using Customizable Software
Recent months have become a perfect demonstration of how the market environment can change completely very rapidly. Even as the coronavirus pandemic slows down, the economic drawdown will create pressure on corporate earnings, and stimulate competition.
The right choice of a business management and automation software can be crucial to survival and steady development in this new reality. But what should this software look like? The answer is: open code, flexible and customizable. Today we will talk about how businesses can adapt to changing markets and boost sales by using such solutions.
Saving time and money
Modern business processes generate large amounts of data that need to be correctly processed by business management software to get better results. Moreover, when the business process changes, the amount of data to analyze may increase. The software should be able to track all needed types of data and be adaptable, to add new sources.
For example, in a service business, where engineers fix equipment located at customers’ venues, the simple task of replacing one detail generates a lot of data. To correctly calculate the workload, ROI, and cost, you need to account for the price of the detail, whether it is in stock or not, how long it usually takes to fix it, where the customer is located (how much time an engineer will spend to get there and back).
To correctly evaluate the workload for the specific employee, the software should be able to process not only the number of orders but also geodata. If the solution can’t work with such data, or it is impossible to set up an integration with a corresponding data source, the task could not be solved.
Also, very often, collecting data from multiple sources in one place can result in significant savings due to proper automation. For example, there are cases when companies that sell construction materials could push down the cost of materials delivery by implementing storage for delivery prices provided by different transportation companies and using this data for automated supplier selection. This approach allows savings up to 15–25% on delivery only.
1C:Drive is capable of working with multiple types of data and sources, which provides a perfect opportunity for building automation that reduces costs, increases the quality of planning, and speeds up business processes.
Flexible corporate structure for working on multiple markets
Some time ago, working on several markets simultaneously was the thing only big companies can do. Nowadays, however, even despite the pandemic, there are tons of small and medium businesses involved in cross-border operations, having multiple legal entities worldwide to support their activities.
One company may be used to deal with customs. Another is created for handling sales. The third legal entity may be dedicated to service tasks, etc. Thus, to be effective, business management and automation software should be able to support all business activities and legal entities in one system.
The business has not only correctly understood what goods, when, and where were sent, but track prices and transactions between controlled legal entities. Very often, such operations will involve different currencies, which should be converted back and forth. The pricing policies for various regions and countries may be different as well. However, from a business point of view, you should understand the profits at the top level in a single currency.
If the business management software can’t support multiple companies and work with different currencies, it will limit the company’s international expansion, harm the quality of a tax management, and revenues and profits calculation. Multi-company feature of 1C:Drive allows the creation of any number of legal entities to conduct business operations, and accordingly track all transactions, and overall profitability of business processes.
Scalability to fuel growth
The growing enterprise is changing every day. Having 50 customers is different from having 200, and 250 is not the same thing as serving 5000 customers. Business processes will alter new products, or even business verticals can be launched. So, the business automation solution should adapt to such changes.
The company shall be able to adapt to software to support its business processes, not change processes to fit them better in the framework that the solution developers created. This is why 1C:Drive scales appropriately along with the company’s growth with no need to switch to an advanced version or paying for add-ons.
Our solutions enable the implementation of different modules and the creation of customer configurations. Some of these features are suitable for SMBs, while others are perfect for large companies with multiple points of presence
For example, 1Ci client in Turkey, Labmarker, which sells laboratory products, has a huge amount of daily Sales orders and Purchasing orders. This huge amount of work needs a very powerful Demand planning tool. Actually we already have a Demand planning tool in 1C:Drive, but for Labmarker we made some enhancements and small developments for making this tool more meaningful. And also after Labmarker plans their demand and puts the products to their inventory they need another useful tool for dispatching the goods which have been already added to the Sales orders’ rows. For this requirement, we developed a Goods dispatching tool for Labmarker, for accelerating their routine workflow.
