As a business owner, integrators need reliable visibility into how their organization is doing. Just some of the key questions are:
- What are your margins?
- Are your staff fully utilized?
- What new business is coming in?
- Do we have capacity to take on work?
- Is our backlog growing or shrinking?
- Do we have enough cash to support our growth?
- The list is not a short one…
So how do you gain better visibility? First, look at your processes; having workflow driven processes that align with how staff work is the first step. Removing stagnant silos of information is the second. One giant leap forward is to centralize your business information into a singled unified ERP system.
A purpose-built system will have formal processes built in, allowing you to effectively measure performance and see how work is affecting margins in real-time. You will be able to plan with a high degree of confidence because the system is driving the information and building a more complete picture.
Some of the target ranges and key performance indicators that an integrator should be looking at to examine his business, according to Brad Dempsey, CEO of Solutions360 is to understand gross margins.
“The way each company measures gross margins can be very different,” he says. “It depends on what you put a what’s called above the line. What’s important is that the ratio between your gross profit, which is the dollar value, as opposed to gross margin, which is the percentage value that covers your overhead — and that’s a very important measurement,” he says. “What that ratio is between what your gross profit is and what your overhead is, is very important and that’s what integrators really need to watch very carefully.”
Some other things to consider are closing rates which is dependent upon the business. “You know if you’re at a targeted market like nurse call, you may be closing 50% of your business; if you’re more in a bid market, you may be closing 10%,” says Dempsey.
“So a lot of those ratios become relative and that’s where belonging to organizations like NSCA publish some of those statistics and where you can talk to peers and see what they’re facing can be very helpful,” he says.
Utilizing a solution like Q360, you will squeeze out the lag time of waiting on critical information coming from across the organization. You will be presented with real-time, complete, and in-context information that you can make sound business decisions on.
With Q360 business owners know where they are and where their business is going. And when inputs change that affect the business they’ll be in the perfect position to pivot and plan accordingly.
