Tips to improve your workflow
Workflow, the backbone of the business
A workflow is the one thing that has been headache for small businesses. The workflow might be a simple word to drop for such a huge idea.
Workflow consists of a basis of your business. You might be in service or product or both sector. Starting from finding the prospect, to finally provide/ship the service/product there are a number of things that are going in and out.
As a business owner, the main goal is – and should – making sure our customers are satisfied with the service. This has two fold advantage. First the customer is happy and s/he will stay for further business and second, the customer will refer you in her/his circle which means more business.
But, the workflow could make or break you in this journey. If you miss some step in the middle, it will have a domino effect on further steps. This is not something you want to happen on your business.
Lets take a simple example to see the effect. You have a business selling toys. And you have a website for accepting orders and based on the orders you will either pull from your inventory or order from other sources and ship it.
As you can see there are couple of steps going in this case. If you haven’t controlled the most sold toys in your inventory, you might have promised wrong delivery date for your customer. Not only that, you might also incur a price difference during this time.
What is the solution then?
The main player here is having each step as independent task than looking the whole thing as one monolithic step. For this, either you can assign your time/resource for each and make sure each is in time everyday. Like getting report on each on an hourly or weekly basis. A simple Excel sheet might also be with than having nothing.
Here in Solution Ladder, we do take workflow for our clients seriously. We have crated system that makes it easier for business owners to be alerted, like sms or email, whenever there is critical flaw in the process. We are happy to help you as well