Use technology in your favour

 Dear Entrepreneur,

When you hear the word technology, how does it make you feel? Are you ecstatic because you are tech-savvy or it overwhelms you because you are not comfortable around technology?

Lately, I have been taking stock of my business and looking for areas that need improvement and technology is one of those areas. If like me, you are not a digital native, technology can be quite daunting. There are just too many technological solutions out there that it's difficult to sift through them and find the right ones for one's business.

At the same time, we all know that for our businesses to be agile, we have to embed technology in them otherwise, we run the risk of burning out trying to ensure that every part of our businesses runs smoothly.

If as entrepreneurs, we are going to have more time on our hands, increase our process speeds and open ourselves to more business, automation is inevitable.

Workflow automation

One vital area that requires automation is workflows. Menial, simple, repetitive and trivial tasks that consume so much of our time with little profit and yet are important for the functioning of businesses are great candidates for automation. Automating them also helps in removing human error.

Consider the example of a fast-food joint. Back in the day, when you placed your order at the counter, the till operator would write your order on a piece of paper, punch in the items in the cash register and pass the order on a piece of paper to the kitchen. What could go wrong with that, right? Except, we all have a tale of a time our order wasn't sent to the kitchen, and we had to wait for an inordinately long time to get our order!

Also, can you see the repetition in that process- writing the order on a piece of paper then entering it onto the cash register!

Automation in the fast-food industry improved the industry's turnaround times and eliminated the risk of orders not reaching the kitchen. With an automated process, the till operator enters the order directly into the order terminal which, is linked to the kitchen, so orders are not lost. At the same time, because the till operator doesn't have to repeat work, they can now take more orders than before.

Advantages of workflow automation:

1. Workflows are made effective. All steps in the process are integrated, ensuring that each phase happens as quickly as it can and on time. In a fast-food joint, order taking takes less time now than it used to because there is no longer repetition of the order taking task as was the case before.
2. Automation encourages greater collaboration between departments as everyone involved in delivering on a process has access to workloads of each task and timelines.  
3. Automation helps management with planning as they can see the progress of each event within the business allowing them to help out when anything ever finds itself held up along the way. For example, if the front office is receiving a lot of orders, management can make an on the spot decision to move people to the fulfilment department so that there is no hold-up in the delivery of orders. 
4. Automation allows a business to maximise efficiency while reducing the risk of failure, allowing companies to achieve their set targets. 
5. Automation allows people to know exactly what job they need to carry out for that specific task.
6. Automating your workflows makes it much easier for you to start preparing and planning each part of your business in the right manner.

The argument for automating our businesses is greater than our fear of technology, so if you haven't already, it is time to use technology in your favour.

The Lean Machine!

Without operations, there would be no business, and yet, some businesses focus the least attention and resources here, until trouble hits. It's insane, right, given that it is through operations that a business serves its customers. 

Often, successful operations are a product of infinitely titchy tweaks (continuous improvement) as opposed to the big bang type of changes (radical). Maybe that's why they often get forgotten once a business is set up and running.

Characteristics of successful operations

 

Successful operations are necessarily

1. Efficient- producing with little effort or cost as is possible.
2. Effective- add value to customers, i.e. produces what customers really want.
3. Externally supportive- they provide a source of competitive advantage.

As businesses run, over time, one finds that slack builds into the operations, and they will no longer be as efficient nor as effective as they were before. They will, therefore, no longer be a source of competitive advantage.

Poor operations comprise rising production costs even as competitors are managing to contain theirs, increase in customers complaints regarding the product/service, for example, poor customer experience in the tech sector, and rises in defective products. 

To avoid operations reaching this stage, continuously improving them is paramount. One easy framework a business can employ in ensuring that its operations are effective and efficient is LEAN MANAGEMENT.

What is Lean Management

Lean Management is a management practice based on the philosophy of continuously 'doing more with less.' One of the pillars on which Lean management is built on is eliminating waste, where waste is any activity that does not add value either to the business or the customers. 

Why Lean Management

Many companies undertake lean first and foremost to survive, and secondarily to flourish. So if a business's operations are no longer a source of competitive advantage, or are sluggish, this is a tool they can use to improve them. 

By analysing one's operations, one can tell which of these wastes are available in their operations and seek to eliminate or minimise them.

Though a very simple framework, Lean Management can bring enormous relief to operations, especially when one considers that there is an indirect correlation between reducing non-value adding activities and increasing customer value. So the benefits of implementing Lean management in business are immense.

Remember that Lean management is a continuous improvement tool, so you can analyse your operations at regular timeframes and reduce or eliminate waste in your operations.

Good luck turning your operations into a Lean machine!

Business strategy

Often when entrepreneurs speak about business strategies they mention growth, revenue and profit targets. While this is commendable as it serves as a guide for entrepreneurs; these are just goals, plans, targets and not a strategy. 

What is strategy?

A strategy is a set of actions taken by an organisation in pursuit of their long term objectives. As such, strategy is focused on a company’s long term plans- 5years or longer. 

 

So when talking about strategy, ideally, it should read, 'our strategy is (name of strategy). It is about (define what the strategy is about). We will emphasise these actions (state the actions to be pursued). Our expected outputs are (revenue) by (year). Check out DHL’s strategy https://www.dpdhl.com/en/about-us/mission-and-strategy.html

 

The reason most entrepreneurs cannot articulate their strategy is that they have not crafted one. In this installation, we will walk through the crafting of a strategy.

 

Please note: this is not an exhaustive exercise, and the frameworks mentioned here are interchangeable with other frameworks out there.

 

Why strategy?

 

A strategy assists a business to achieve outstanding success by identifying its sources of superior business performance and advancing actions to be taken that exploit these sources of superior performance in a world were turbulence, unpredictability and intense competition will continue to dominate, such as now with the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

The 3 steps to strategy formulation:

 

1. Analysing: 

A good business strategy considers how the company competes in its industry and location. In turn, this requires a good analysis of an organisation’s internal environment as well as the external environment in which the business operates.

 

External environment

Industry dynamics

To understand the industry dynamics and the industry’s ability to sustain profitability, analysis of the external environment is needed. Porter’s 5/6 Forces framework is a great resource to use as it considers:

(1) competitors (incumbents), 

(2) the threat of new entrants (entry and exit barriers), 

(3) customer power (switching costs, market size, etc), 

(4) the threat of substitutes (products/services that can be used in place of yours), 

(5) supplier power (the ability of suppliers to become your competitors and the power suppliers can wield over you in supplying to you), 

(6) complements (products/services that can be paired well with yours).

 

Key success factors (KSF)- Customer

 

For any business to succeed, it needs to understand the KSFs in its industry. The KSFs are gleaned from customers and can range from price, speed, quality, user experience, etc, so it is paramount that whatever product/service offered meets these KSFs.

Internal environment

One must be aware of an organisation's key resources and capabilities to exploit them to grow their business! Strategy formulation helps you dig deep into your organisation and find your strengths and if you have none, pushes you to develop those resources and capabilities.

A useful framework to use in evaluating resources and capabilities is VRIO (Valuable, Rare, Imitability, Organisation) developed by J.B Barney. Testing resources and capabilities- financial, HR, tangible and intangible (knowledge, brand, patents, data)- using this framework will reveal where the competitive advantage lies, and the resources and capabilities that need exploiting for your organisation to generate superior profits. It will also reveal the resources and capabilities with a potential for improvement.

  

2. Choosing: 

After considering your external and internal environments and determining your competitive advantage, it is time to decide how you are going to compete in your chosen domain.

A framework to use for this is Porter’s generic strategy, which posits that a business can either compete in a narrow market (niche) or broad market, and either focus on cost leadership or differentiation, though this has been amended to include an integrated cost leadership and differentiation strategy.

 

3. Implementing: 

When you have decided on the strategic direction to take, it is finally time to implement your strategy. But before you implement, test for congruency between the analysis undertaken and the choices made.

 An easy way to determine if there is congruency is to test the choices for:

Suitability: Does the proposed strategy match the needs identified from the strategic analysis. The strategy should be consistent with the environmental or resource analysis and fit the organisational objectives. 

Feasibility: How well it would work in practice and how difficult might it be to achieve.

Acceptability: How will the various organisational stakeholders feel about the expected outcomes of the strategy – typically in terms of risk, profitability, reward, ethics and the effect on relationships.

If the choices being considered meet these criteria, then go ahead and implement your strategy!

Note of caution: Strategy formulation and implementation is an iterative process, not linear, so you can adjust your strategy as you go along to take into account changes in your environments.