Business Automation and Software Blog

Your warehouse plays a vital, central role in your business’ storage and exchange of goods. From storing raw materials and finished goods to providing the physical infrastructure for picking, packing, and shipping orders, the warehouse is truly the beating heart of distribution. Like keeping your own heart healthy, it’s important to keep the heart of your distribution healthy for the best output and increased longevity.

There’s no denying that data is everywhere and connects more and more technologies and experiences in our lives. Just think of any time you’ve searched for a product on Amazon, only to see that same product advertised to you moments later on social media. With data littering every online action we take, it’s easy as a business to be overwhelmed by the volume. Thus, it’s also critical to be smart about big data management. This includes knowing what data to analyze, what to ignore, what data collection is legal, and how to adequately protect and update that data for the best business intelligence.

Perhaps one of the most difficult segments to budget for a business is R&D. This is due in part to the difficulty of tying R&D spending to results. While projects are funded, developed, launched, and sold, it could take years until there is enough data to tie the spending to the results. It’s also rare that only one R&D project is going on, so these costs need to be tracked and appropriately associated between tens to hundreds of simultaneous projects.

No one likes road construction. Between the traffic and the rerouting, slowdowns occur and headaches ensue. But perhaps worst of all are roadblocks, where we thought we had a clear path only to find our planned route blocked.

Last month we talked about some of the perceived roadblocks of moving to lean accounting. Perhaps you scanned those and none of them seemed to apply to your situation, yet you’re still struggling to move to lean accounting. It should be easy to move to a simpler accounting process, right? But sometimes, the bigger the business, the harder it is to just keep focus on the cash flow. If you’re still pushing for lean accounting, there could be a few more orange construction cones in the way.

Every product-based company knows that inventory control is a vital part of the business. Knowing what you have and what you need, how often, and in what quantities helps you make better decisions on how to move the company forward and increase profits. Manual inventory management is time-consuming, tedious, and quite frankly, boring. The good news is, there’s a better way, and that way helps prepare your business for the future.

It takes just the right mix of personality and talent to be a salesperson. They have the skills to uncover exactly what a customers’ needs are (regardless of what they’re told), finding a solution to the problem, and then offering the best product or collection to meet those needs. If that solution can come at a price that makes the customer happy, that’s even better. The best salespeople know that lowest price does not necessarily equal the highest value.

Most people outside of accounting and finance don’t get that excited about ERP data and analytics. Throughout your career, you’ve likely been subjected to eyes glazing over at a cocktail party when you’ve mentioned that your day job is in finance. But as a CFO, you know that while your ERP data might not make for very good small talk, the smallest nuances and trends in that data make for excellent keys to profitability.

As most good business leaders know, practicing lean involves maximizing value while minimizing waste, essentially creating more value using fewer resources. Lean made its first big impact in business with Henry Ford in 1913, before being improved on by a team at Toyota in the 1930s.

Lean is clearly applicable when it comes to manufacturing, but what about accounting?

When most of us think of supply chain, images of warehouses, trucks, and shipping boxes might come to mind. But what doesn’t necessarily come to mind is data.

That’s right: data. Data can also count as part of the supply chain, but in this case, it’s a supply chain that is feeding information into business intelligence (BI) software. And it’s a supply chain that can often be surprisingly overlooked in the consideration of a BI solution.

The next new thing in cell phones has arrived: Major networks are advertising their 5G networks, and the newest 5G-enabled phones are hitting the market. While many will assume—rightly so—that this means more speed and probably a new phone to accommodate that speed, 5G is actually so much more than the chance to load the latest Snapchat story faster. It actually has some significant implications for business technology.