As you look at your numbers, do you feel like there’s a disconnect with how much business you’re doing and how profitable your company is? It might not occur to you to point your finger at data management when you’re trying to figure out why your bottom line isn’t responding as it should be.
If you aren’t capturing the right data, or if you have to grab data from disparate locations, there could be important questions that you can’t answer, or that you aren’t answering accurately, and this could obstruct your success.
Tracking All Materials and Resources
Data management involves the tracking of all of the materials and products that move in and out of your business, as well as resources that you need to schedule in order to meet customer orders.
Data answers basic questions like -- “When will you ship my order?” and “Did we buy the right amount of material for the job?”
How Data Management Helps You Solve Problems, Avoid Problems, and Sets Your Company Up for Success
1. Manage Costs
When data is properly managed, you can determine if you’ve purchased the right amount of material and pinpoint areas of waste. Tracking down the source of the waste could lead to changes, such as making the bill of materials more accurate, or locating processes or machinery that need to be fixed or optimized.
Cost management doesn’t just pertain to what you buy, but also to how you use what you already have.
You can use data management to reorganize your warehouse and gain more space in the same physical footprint because you know so much more intimately what’s going on the shelves. So, if you were thinking of moving or buying a new building, this may mean you could get more life out of your current space and delay a big expenditure.
2. Maximize Efficiencies
Overlapping with cost management, data management can help you plan appropriately from a production or a delivery standpoint. Just the process of going through a data management improvement project forces you and your team to examine your processes so you can eliminate redundancies, formalize existing processes and create new processes to improve operations.
3. Become Poised to Grow and Scale
It’s not uncommon for a business to manage data with separate systems. For example, one department might be using the line-of-business software, but another may be using a spreadsheet.
One of the results of undergoing a data management improvement project is that you become more process driven and centralized. This allows you to be in a position to coordinate more material, employees, and even locations.
4. Be a More Reliable Supplier and Improve Customer Satisfaction
When you improve how you manage your data, you can be more responsive to customer requirements across the board. The result is that you can be a more reliable supplier and be in a better position to fulfill your promises to your customers.
The more reliable you are, the more reliable your customer can be to their customers.
5. Position Your Company for New Opportunities
More and more companies are mandating that their suppliers have systems set up so that they can get real time data. If you can’t meet their specs, then you can’t compete -- no matter how good your product is.
With good data management in place, you can set yourself up for faster response time when your own customers are scaling, or when you land some new business and need to ramp up operations.
The End Result - A More Profitable Business
Improving the way your company manages data improves every layer of your business. You get transparency into what’s flowing in and out of your business, and how resources are being used.
That's information you can use immediately to reduce costs, become more efficient, and be ready to respond quickly to opportunities or changing customer requirements.
Proper Planning Needed for Data Management Projects
Data management projects are complex. You can’t just get the software and flip the "on" switch. There's a ton of prep work to be done deciding not only what to track, but how to track it. You'll also need to determine if you have the right software or if a different tool would be better for the job. Finally, you'll need to plan out what you need to implement the new technology in terms of infrastructure and equipment.
Here at Accent, we’ve seen time and time again how improving data management improves every layer of business. Sign up for our webinar: Data Management for Manufacturing, Distribution and Logistics Companies to take the first step towards improving your business with better data management.
