Category: Operations

The quicker the payment process is, the more sales you’ll get. This goes for everything from waiting in line in the supermarket to filling in endless fields buying online. So if you’re looking to sell (and who isn’t) then the first thing you need to do in 2014 is to streamline your payment process.

Diversify Your Methods

Providing more than one way to pay makes it more likely that customers will buy. While it’s not practical or advisable to offer lots and lots of different payment types, you should do your research into your target audience and see which they prefer. This is true whether you’re asking for payment in a shop or online, and is even true for traditional cash payments like taxis.

Ecommerce retailers can easily offer a variety of payment methods, but you can make your site especially lucrative if you allow for mobile payments too.

Don’t Over Complicate It

One of the worst things that you can do with online payments is to ask a potential customer to make an account before they buy. While it might be a good way to build up your email marketing list, it’s a major turn off for potential consumers. Not only does it make it take longer to buy anything, the anticipation of a flood of marketing emails is enough to make anyone abandon their basket. It isn’t essential for buying in a physical shop, so why is it necessary for online payments?

Instead, offer the option to buy without creating an account, and make it quick, easy and unobtrusive to buy products from you.

You can still offer the option to create an account – it is often beneficial for returning customers – but make it as easy as possible. Their email address and name should be all you need.

Don’t Forget About the Shop

It’s easy to talk about making payment easy online, and forget about making it easy in your high street shop too. Having as many payment terminals as possible is essential, so why not use something like Card Cutter’s mobile credit card terminals to make your customers’ lives as easy as possible. They work just the same as the ones you see on trains or in restaurants, so you can take payment from your customers anywhere on your shop floor. This means that customers don’t have to queue, and can walk away happy and likely to return.

While technological advancement may mean that it is now easier than ever to establish a business as an entrepreneur, this has created an extremely competitive commercial market. This means that creating a profitable and visible business is a far more difficult business, especially if you intend to sell products through an e-commerce model. In the wake of one of the busiest online shopping days in recent history, it is clear that the market is saturated with independent retailers who compete for a vast and well informed audience.

How Asset Management Software can help you to achieve a Critical Edge in the Market

With this in mind, the proactive entrepreneurs among you may wish to consider investing in asset management software. This delivers considerable advantages to product orientated ventures, primarily because it enables you comply with national legislation and also track every single physical asset that is owned by your firm. In particular, it will allow you to create a real-time graphic that lists each asset, its precise location and its exact cost. There are even advanced packages of software, such as those that have been innovated by Assetware Technology, which help you to create planned maintenance schedules while also calculating the cost of depreciation for each individual product.

With this in mind asset management software can be even more invaluable for companies with a warehouse location and an in-house distribution model. In this instance, advanced software solutions can also be deployed to track assets after they have being shipped, making it far easier to follow their progress and share this information with customers. If managed correctly, it also offer you an opportunity to be proactive and pre-empt any delivery issues or delays, meaning that you can significantly improve your businesses customer service output.

The Last Word

As these examples show, the implementation of advanced asset management software can help to manage production costs, maximise manufacturing output and improve the delivery of customer service. These all translate into higher profit margins for your business, while they also enable you to gain a competitive edge on similar retailers in your particular market niche.

In an age where millions of small and independent online retailers compete for their fair share of a chosen market, even the smallest potential advantage can make a significant difference. This is why any investment in asset management software represents a sound decision, as it is likely to more than repay its value over the course of several years.

Article Contributed by Maricel Rivera

Everyday, new processes are emerging. And everyday, a good number of businesses, even those with already established protocols that have worked magnificently for a period of time, face process challenges that need to be promptly addressed to stay relevant in a competitive marketplace, customer-centric and staff-friendly while keeping a healthy bottom line.

Business process management, or BPM, isn’t new news. BPMInstitute.org, a peer-to-peer exchange platform for BPM professionals, asserts that BPM is a dynamic process and has, over the years, evolved – on the technology front, from standalone applications to workflow solutions to business process management suites (BPMS), and on the business side of the house, from total quality management to business process re-engineering and, finally, business process management.

Commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms vs. adaptive solutions

The goal of BPM is not just process automation. It’s also about continuous innovation and process optimization. Software platforms that are commercially available off-the-shelf work just fine with zero or little tweaking provided your processes, say, your new hiring and onboarding protocols, don’t change much from one instance to another.

Considering the dynamic nature of most, if not all, business processes, this can be a limiting factor. What happens if a process change is warranted?

One significant weakness of packaged solutions or ready-made software is customization, particularly the lack or limited nature thereof. So when process changes happen or end-product specifications are updated, businesses are forced to consider any one of the following options to still meet their business obligations on time, on budget and as expected:

1. Find and deploy a better software solution even if that means (a) ditching already existing systems, and (b) hours of staff and management training to familiarize everyone with the ins and outs of the new software.
2. Build their own software.
3. Commission the software vendor to make changes to the code.
4. Hire coding experts to perform the needed changes.

Whichever choice they opt to employ entails possible project delays, additional expenses and, in the case of building their own software from scratch, a skilled IT team and a solid IT infrastructure.

On the other hand, adaptive solutions, like Comindware Tracker, are gaining a lot of traction and are largely being seen as replacement to “stiff” commercially off-the-shelf software. Some industry observers and practitioners agree that BPM will one day outplace traditional programming, especially in terms of rapid deployment of IT solutions.

Why choose adaptive BPM?

Aside from getting a packaged solution that’s based on industry research, with COTS, you’re entitled to vendor support whenever you run across issues and challenges while implementing the software.

In the case of proprietary software scratch-built in-house, you have the ability to design and create an application that meets your unique business protocols, which, unfortunately, is generally a costly proposition, considering the infrastructure and deep IT talent pool you have to have, plus the maintenance you will need to undergo from time to time.

Business process

BPM is a discipline that involves people, processes and philosophy. Adaptive BPM, mainly because of its ability to support customization at various stages of the business or workflow process, is like getting the best of both worlds. You get software support, and you’re awarded the ability to make changes to pre-built templates/solutions, sans the programming know-how, to adhere to current client or market demands.

People

Multitasking, they say, is a necessary evil modern-day workers are exposed to on a daily basis. Multitasking, however, results in execution errors and can trump information retention, problem solving and creativity. Adaptive BPM helps in multiple task management, and empowers your people in terms of real-time visibility and team collaboration.

Legacy tools

If your business has been operating for a while, chances are you already have system tools in place, like Outlook or SharePoint, for example. Adopting an adaptive BPM suite means keeping your legacy systems intact, data included, even being able to work in the same environment you and your staff are already familiar with while the BPM engine works silently in the background.

Conclusion

Working with commercially available software has its merits, but if your business processes are constantly changing, looking into a BPM solution that’s flexible enough to address your business needs without breaking the bank is a worthy exercise.

About the Author:

Maricel Rivera is a content writer for Comindware, a work management technology company providing easy-to-configure business process management software. Comindware Tracker, its flagship product, is an adaptive enterprise solution that comes with built-in process management templates that you can customize with drag-and-drop ease.

Recruitment of staff is hard enough, but the retainment of quality staff is even harder. All too often businesses struggle because of a high staff turnover, with staff leaving and taking their skills with them. This type of turn over results in frequent repeated initial training at the basic level combined with frequent loss of the time and money put into that training. So how do we keep our staff on the payroll for longer than a few months?

Developing a Community

One of the most important aspects of any business is the working atmosphere. Get it right and it can be one of the leading factors in why your staff come to work. Get it wrong and it can really get your staff down, potentially even making them consider taking another job elsewhere. Creating a positive atmosphere that is inviting for new staff and makes existing staff feel secure and valued can be difficult, particularly if you have a large workforce and/or many sites. Take time to read up on new techniques  you could try and enforce them slowly so you can monitor the effect accurately.

Developing Basic Skills

Staff feel much more positive about their jobs when they are certain of the expectations on them and they know that they can carry out their duties effectively. Nobody likes to feel that they don’t know what they are doing. Make sure that staff in customer facing roles understand their roles by training using call logging software like Lanonyx. Playback example calls to demonstrate good and bad practice and ask staff to discuss other ways that they could have dealt with this particular issue.

Developing Your Workforce

One of the major reasons for staff leaving and moving onto another job is that they feel there is no chance for progression in their current role. Make sure that this isn’t the case in your company by being clear about the various progression routes on offer and also how to work towards them. Do you want interested parties to work on an evidence portfolio? Will you interview a number of interested parties for upcoming roles using a standard application procedure? Are you planning on simply offering the most deserving candidate a promotion and if so, what are the criteria? Be clear and transparent about your procedures to ensure that everyone feels like they have an equal opportunity.

 

 

It’s not really a secret that planning a business event requires a high level of organisational skill. There are many things that you have to consider besides why it is that you want to hold it in the first place and who it is that you want to be there on the day. It isn’t an easy task for many of us.

If this is something that you think you might need help with getting your head around, then there are just one or two of the things that you may want to consider when planning your event to help it go well.

Think about the location

If you are planning a big event for your business, you might be a little bit worried about how you are going to be able to hold it, maybe more so if you only have a small or modest sized work space.

If this is going to be an issue, then there is also the option to hire an event space or tent that will help you to accommodate the people you would like to invite or the activities that you want to run.

Invite people on a ‘need to be there’ basis

When we are throwing personal parties for ourselves or a loved one, many of us may have a tendency to invite everyone that we know so that you one feels left out or offended. However, if you invited all of your business contacts to your event rather than only the people who you think need to be there, or who you think it could be really important to have, then things could get complicated. It will increase the amount of space that you need to accommodate everyone, and drive up the cost of food and facilities, so be careful if you’re on a tight budget.

It’s also a good idea to make sure that you have up to date contact details for everyone involved in case they do not turn up, or you need to check if they will be attending.

Think about transport

If people are coming a long way to get to your event, you may want to think about how easy it will be to get to via public transport. Do you need to arrange a place for people to stay the night if it will be a late running or evening event?