Using IT to Survive and Revive

Survival goes beyond just cutting costs and hanging in there. It’s about optimising business processes for today’s tough climate and building a robust business platform to deliver growth when markets take off again.

Truly understanding today’s changing market conditions means having access to real-time business data from across the entire franchise network. Daily, or hourly, insight into sales trends, stock positions and operating expenses enables more accurate benchmarking for better business decisions.

The ability to respond quickly to an unpredictable market means completely automating the supply chain and gaining full stock visibility. Removing all manual processes improves staff efficiency, in turn improving your bottom line.

Automating transaction processes is a key component of reducing operating costs. Time spent ringing around the franchise network chasing stock availability, manually rekeying sales orders or updating paper-based stock systems impacts staff efficiency and customer service.

Complete visibility of stock levels throughout the supply chain enables inventory costs to be tightly controlled to directly improve cash flow. Automatically updating pricing, contract and promotional offers from a central system delivers gross margin control, improving profitability and the ability to quickly respond to market pressures.

Real-time business data can only be achieved with the integration of disparate business systems. A growing number of franchises are turning to an outsourced, ‘software as a service’ (SAAS) IT model to cost effectively deploy integrated business systems to franchise owners. All sites use the same central system providing a rich data warehouse for gaining greater insight into business conditions.

SAAS models enable franchise owners to hit the ground running, providing immediate online access to highly customised business systems without a large, upfront IT investment. Released from the burden of back office IT operations, franchisees can get on with servicing customers and planning for future growth.

Drew Arthur is the director of Micronet Systems (Australia) and has worked with over 2000 small and mid sized businesses and franchise operations to optimise their business processes.