Ask any successful small business owner his secret to success and the answer is likely to be “hands-on management”. In the Middle Ages, this actually meant that the manager stood behind his employee to check that work was done correctly. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it means using technology to always know what is going on in your business.
Small business owners can now use an enterprise resource planning system (ERP), such as SAP Business One, a comprehensive, integrated software solution, to ensure greater control over their businesses.
“This system streamlines business processes into a single system, yielding more consistent data and greater workflow efficiency, which, in turn, ensures more control over the most important business information,” says Heinrich de Leeuw of Seidor.
By simply looking at a dashboard, small business owners can check on the health and performance of their businesses. Increased visibility guarantees more accurate bookkeeping, providing a more realistic picture of business’ operation and performance.
“Greater visibility of business operations is important in today’s competitive environment to ensure small business owners act decisively and immediately. Small business owners need to have total access to every important process in their businesses and with SAP Business One, data is easily accessible, such as inventory levels that can be checked daily. If you know your inventory levels, you can control your working capital more precisely,” Heinrich de Leeuw explains.
The complete visibility of ERP offers a full, complete picture at any given moment that enables small businesses to gain greater control over their operations. Handling all their processes through one solution, that integrates finance, human resources, marketing and sales, as well as manufacturing, supply chain, services and procurement into a single intelligent system, ensure the hands-on management a small business needs to succeed.
“The increased control ERP offers helps small business owners to streamline key processes, gain greater insight into the business and make decisions based on real-time information to drive profitable growth.”
SAP Business One is a powerful solution that offers efficient and streamlined control over each department, without requiring small business owners to micro-manage employees. “They can allocate responsibility and accountability to specific employees and schedule and allocate tasks to them, while they can also monitor completion of these tasks,” Heinrich de Leeuw says.
Another benefit is that authorisation parameters can be implemented to minimise the risk of human error and improve control over certain functions and tasks. SAP Business One ensures that small businesses have the transparency and visibility required to increase control and ensure that the business runs optimally.
Small business owners can track expenses in real-time to see the cash-flow status of the business at the click of a button. They also have complete insight into daily operations and task progress to track resource utilisation and capacity.
Staff working in a small business can also seamlessly track and trace orders in a single system which allows for greater efficiency in the returns, warranty and recall processes, while visibility over inventory and its location helps avoid stock-outs.
“SAP Business One offers small business owners complete access to all critical business information instantly, enabling them to make proactive, strategic business decisions. It is therefore clear that small businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition need clear insight into their daily functions and activities,” Heinrich de Leeuw points out.
It is essential for small businesses to identify areas of opportunity and improvement to respond to market changes instantly and strategically. Visibility enables them to coordinate and control the business to work as a cohesive unit to achieve organisational and profitability goals.
“One of the biggest challenges for small businesses is how to control each aspect of the business and obtain the insight needed to make profitable business decisions. If a business is still using spread sheets or disparate systems it will probably not be successful unless it changes to an ERP system that offers technological hands-on management,” Heinrich de Leeuw says.