Detailed analysis of what is happening in your business.
We focus on analysing your areas of your business that requires business improvement and strengthening. Some businesses underestimate the importance of having fully implemented and integrated systems and processes to support their business. The consequences are often that they are unable to accurately account for and analyse what’s actually happening. Quite often the true performance of the business is lost in translation and is at too high a level.
Our Business Improvement team can help.
Our business improvement team includes experienced CFO’s and data analysts. They have extensive business and systems knowledge and understand how systems should be structured. Our data analysts extract data from a broad range of business systems including your company’s accounting system, then clean, organise and present that data in dashboards or reports.
We have experience in reviewing processes, particularly administrative processes, to identify where inefficiencies exist and how systemising processes can help. Getting your systems to do the work quicker, more accurately and therefore more efficiently.
The underlying driver here is for us to have owners better informed as to what’s really happening in their business. Often the review processes focuses on the Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet, which at a high level is fine.
We believe in continuous improvement across all areas of the business to drive efficiencies and better performance that ultimately leads to higher sustainable profitability.
But often the devil is in the detail.
Being able to drill down to project or product level allows management to assess whether the business is operating where they feel it should be. Structuring systems to be able to analyse the business at this level is key, so too is the ability of the business to record that activity accurately at that same level.
Telling Signs
- A business is profitable but not anywhere near where it should be.
- Owners just don’t have access to detailed information that highlights where things are going wrong, or where performance isn’t matching expectations.
- The systems you are using are old or outdated and maybe unstable, so doing anything to them is a risk.
- The systems haven’t been set up to reflect what the business does and possibly where it does it.
- The actual cost of doing things (projects or selling products or providing services) has been underestimated
- Staff employed have always done it this way.
What we do to help
Initial Step
A journey of discovery: identify and document what is actually happening now (processes). What is the current interrelationship between systems and processes.
E.g. Project costings, pricing and quoting through to accounting for the costs against that project, billing and reporting.
Look at the systems employed by the company. Are staff aware of features that could help them do their job better. If the systems aren’t appropriate, what other options are available and suitable for the business.
We would then report back to the business on our findings and recommendations as to how to improve processes and how to gain efficiencies through more effective use of their systems. We could then help your business make the changes needed.
Next Steps
Once the changes to the business systems have been completed you can now record business activity at a level conducive to what the business does. We can then start to look at how to extract that data and use it to inform owners and managers on how they are performing.
Our skilled data analysts can extract data from any business system. They will organise it, check and clean it and then present it in a meaningful way for owners and managers to use, interpret and act on.
The analysts would set up and manage dashboards and a suite of reports that better suits what managers and owners need. They will then highlight performance flaws at the level where changes need to be made.