The key questions to ask to make your business more efficient
I am often asked by business leaders how they can make their company more efficient. They have heard about Dynamics 365, they have
heard about the cloud and they want to know how their organisations can be more productive.
But often they don’t even know where to start when they try and analyse what the right next steps are in their use of technology.
They have heard about digital transformation, but don’t really know where to start.
It is important that people running organisations start by asking the right questions in order to land the correct answers.
Manually move data
One of the first questions that I ask them to dig into is: How often do your staff manually move and update data?
Think about all those manual processes at month-end: endless CSVs and Excel spreadsheets being created to pull in sales reports,
invoices, deliveries etc. How many are pulled from one system and moved to another?
Staff can spend days exporting data for a monthly management report, moving information from one system and along.
I liken it to a relay race where the baton is being passed from one person to another. In a company, you really want to make that as
smooth as possible, whether that is by using dashboards or Teams alerts or email, all as automated as possible.
Swiss clock
You want to free up your people to do the important job of analysing the information to make proper business decisions, not
focusing on creating the reports. And Dynamics 365 is like a Swiss clock, with many tiny cogs that help shuffle data along.
Another question for business leaders is: How many documents are being made by hand?
Anything that is created twice should be automated: the tech is there to make automation speed so much up and reduce an incredible
amount of wasted time.
One of our consumer services clients used to manually type in thousands of responses to “Request for Information” coupons that were
printed in Sunday newspapers.
It was an entirely manual process and took a number of staff way too much time and effort to sort out.
Time-consuming workflows
It was so time-consuming and inefficient, but now they have found a 3rd party automation fulfilment house that can scan them into
their system and the data flows smoothly into their internal workflow.
Productivity apps such as Dynamics 365, Office, Teams and PowerApps are rapidly reducing the amount of manual data-gathering and
sharing that organisations have traditionally done and just these simple questions demonstrate that improvements can be made.
Another key question is: Can your customers find the right answers to their issues smoothly?
For so many businesses, their clients face the same issues and challenges or have the same queries. Dynamics CRM can provide you with
the right information on what is affecting your customers and improve automated customer support and handling.
For more information on how to make your organisation more efficient and productive, contact us and we can help
you deep dive into these key questions.
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About the Author
John Clark
Founder | Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Consultant, Solutions Shared Ltd