Is 2010 The Time To Integrate Multi-Site Operations At Mid Sized Companies?

 

                              Does your customer experience rival this video?

Midsize companies once again, in 2010, are looking to grow their way out of this economy with new market opportunities. However, many are still dealing with the constraints of the current recession landscape and outdated thinking.  COOs are confronted with legacy IT infrastructure that is lacks compatibility with multi-site operations. Inadequate I.T. and Customer Service infrastructure can lead emerging companies to stall on new market opportunities and falling behind their competitors. Selected 2010 strategic operations thinking might start to include these in the company’s plan as indicator are looking like it is time to move on for the future:

1.        Flexibility and simplicity will need to comply with different business locations and ease of training new personnel. Web based outsourced I.T. systems are becoming the norm and leveling the playing field.

2.       Work flow automation; Make adjustments so it becomes possible to manage complex business operations, such as payroll, deliveries, contracts, and customer service with just a click of the mouse on one computer screen through a cross trained staff.

3.       Get into the clouds; Push your I.T systems into an associated overhead model. Email, inventory control, purchasing, scheduling, and normal business processes etc, need to be outsourced, but controlled through your web based system.

4.       Think customer centric visibility; all customers and facilities will need to be able to access your system via their home computer for their applicable, selected, (read only) view of information in real time. This not only is the customer’s expectation, but the global view of data needs to flow from the customer up, not company down. This will give the senior management what they have always wanted, accurate snapshots of what is happening. All the benefits of forecasting and projecting the future growth plan come into play in real time. 

5.     It takes years to get a customer and seconds to lose them. Understand and embrace personalized Social Media at all your  physical locations seamlessly through centralized operations.

All this can be done easy and affordably without converting to a new computer system. The time is now to reinvent your company as a variable overhead model. The ROI pay back will pay for itself in lowering costs, reducing overhead, and attracting more customers through management of real time trending reports and positive customer experiences.  Most applications to this “here and now” conversion are now lower in cost and higher in capabilities than they have ever been. The time to modernize couldn’t be better……………