Business Process Re-Engineering Tips

You've been in business long enough to know how critical making quick, insightful decisions can create successes for your business. You've also been in business long enough to realize how vital accurate data analysis and reporting is and the impact it has on making those key decisions. However, if you're still using spreadsheets and standalone data sources to develop your business strategies, not only are you risking missing critical data and being overwhelmed with the amount of data you're having to manually deal with, but you're wasting time, money and resources that could lead you to failure, instead of success.

Here are 5 ways you can go through a business process re-engineering, develop a software project plan and make your business not only more successful but have the decision making process a lot easier and faster at the same time.

Step 1: Simplify your data world. All too often, businesses windup using several different software packages to do essentially the same thing. The sales department will be using one software package, the shipping/receiving department using others, the support department using yet another and accounts payable/receivable yet another. All of these data sources are working from essentially the same customer and vendor lists so finding packages that can be used by multiple departments will help reduce data bloat.

Step 2: Integrate, integrate, integrate. Get as much of your software working from the same databases as possible. Also, finding reporting packages that will pull data from the separate databases will smooth the dataflow process. The key to making great decisions is in properly mining the available data.

Eliminating redundancies by integration will enable you to start simplifying not only your IT business processes but your decision making process as well.

Step 3: Upgrade. Upgrade servers, upgrade software packages, upgrade user PC's. Get as current as possible so the data flow speed will be at its maximum and you will enjoy all the benefits of new features and the latest security. Using responsible IT process management, make sure your systems and your software are as current as possible.

Step 4: Maximize report integration: Your main concern is the bottom line. It doesn't matter if that is the bottom line in the sales department, research and development, shipping and receiving or overhead, your business decisions are based off of those bottom line numbers. If you still have staff members distilling that information from spreadsheets, you're wasting time, staff resources and money. With today's software technologies and reporting packages, all of that information can be distilled, virtually at the click of a mouse, giving you instant snapshots of those bottom line numbers.

Step 5: Look ahead. If all you focus on today is today, then you're already behind. Success in today's competitive environments means looking for what's next. You can use data analysis of your past and current numbers as one factor of your decision making process but the key to the future is correct anticipation of what's trending, what's new and what will happen. That brings even more data into your decision making picture and having a tight, cohesive system to give you what is going on now and to show you possible futures will be what leads to your success.

Your business is all about data, whether it be people data, product data, sales data or trending data, you have to have ways to distil that data cloud into numbers you can make decisions with. Re-engineering your business processes by reducing redundancies, integrating data, speeding up your systems, using a reporting system that pulls from all your data sources and looking toward the future, your decision making will be much faster and more accurate. This means your business is more successful.

A Stock Market Education From the Guys Who Predicted the Crash

If you want a stock market education, follow the people who predicted the credit crunch. Believe it or not, there were a lot of people who saw the problems build and tried to bring attention to it. The problem was that no one in authority would listen. They waved all comers away with standard "It's fine" rhetoric. How can we have in the UK a tripartite financial regulator and not see an issue as huge as this before it surfaces? No doubt, there will be many people who will pay for the oversight once everything settles down and the blame game and the lawsuits start in earnest.

Let's start at the very top. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (he could use a stock market education) for the period leading up to the credit crisis - please take a bow Mr Gordon Brown. He labelled his own time as the chancellor as "the age of irresponsibility". How those words must be haunting him now. Not only did he not oversee the banking system effectively, as the huge credit binge got underway, but neither did the FSA, his flagship regulator, or the Bank of England, who he stripped of many powers as soon as he got into Number 11.

They literally sat there are the housing bubble grew to sizes that were both unprecedented and unsustainable. They oversaw explosive growth which led to record levels of personal debt. They stood by as the banking system went on a derivatives binge that would is bringing it to its knees...and yet they said nothing. Why?

There is no answer to this, but you could argue that there was coordinated ignorance or wilful participation. Only months before the crisis began, the powers that be told us that the economy was in great shape and GDP growth was expected to continue clipping along at a decent pace. How could the people who led us in our economic destiny get something so fundamental so wrong?

The answer is simple. Either they are all incompetent to the extent that they should all be fired and personally immediately for negligence, or they are all lying to us. Either way...they have to go or get a stock market education.