fbpx

Guest Blog: Go digital and boost your operational resilience

Guest Blog: Go digital and boost your operational resilience

GeoNext Job Scheduling and Management Software

GeoNext are our expert Directory Partners in job management software. They are offering a free trial for Tradie Wives with 50% off the first three months. In this blog they unpack why being operationally resilient is crucial in a world of constant disruptions and uncertainty and how going digital is a sure way to bolster your business.

The last few years have shown that adaptability and agility have been crucial to maintaining an edge in dealing with Covid-19.

Across the trades industries some businesses have had to cut back on staff, or close while for others demand is still high along with increasingly complex requirements to manage a safe and healthy working environment.

But if the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that businesses who invest during tough times emerge stronger. Indeed, global consultancy firm McKinsey recently published a paper stating how business leaders that ‘Rethink their organization’ and ‘Accelerate digital adoption’ through COVID will “set the foundations for enduring success” as we emerge.

So what does this investment look like for businesses like the ‘tradie wife and hubby’’ ventures through to larger enterprises currently experiencing increased demand with stretched resources to meet it? The common denominator is operational resilience.

Operational resilience is all about building in the processes, capacity, and systems to allow your business to carry on while minimising disruption. So for example, if you mostly use a paper based system to manage your jobs, finances, staff and customers, you may find that the more work that comes in, the more time you’ll be spending managing the admin. Considering ways such as adopting systems to help streamline a chunk of your admin is one way to improve the operational resilience of your business (and your sanity!).

How to assess your operational resilience

There are many factors that need to be considered when looking at the operational resilience of your business. How resilient is your financial model and customer demand for your products and services? What risk management policies and procedures are in place and how adaptive are they? How does the effectiveness of your supply chain impact your business? How is technology being integrated to support your business – from better products and tools to software that manages your jobs, team and finances? We’ve broken it down into four areas to consider:

1. Protecting your critical services

Identifying and maintaining the crucial aspects of your business and resources needed to focus efforts under stress can be helpful in boosting your resilience. From here you should look to understand the maximum tolerable level of disruption to your business and scenario test to see how effective the improvements you made are.

2. Managing your business continuity amidst a crisis

Create crisis management and business continuity plans. Understand the current environment and plan for future impacts on operations, supply chains, cash flow and your workforce. Crucial to this is effective communications and managing the expectations around the relationship with your customers, suppliers and any other third party agencies.

3. Workforce and culture

Two concepts that work well together are the wellbeing of your staff and their productivity. What working conditions and cultural changes can you introduce to help maintain the wellbeing of your team? Are there productivity tools that can be used to digitise manual tasks to improve efficiency? As Richard Branson said, “If you look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple.”

4. Technology resilience

Make an assessment of the current level of technology used in your business. What’s working? What’s not? Is your current IT capacity effective enough? How can you best optimise your operations that relieve the pressure on staff, streamline processes and reduce costs? Which leads us to job management software…

Why job management software is crucial to your success

Fundamentally, good job management software improves the efficiency of your processes and workflows so you can consistently provide a valuable customer experience.

Quoting and scheduling work then linking up your team, customers and resources needed to do the job can be unnecessarily time consuming if you don’t have the right job management system in place. If you are using multiple paper based or less effective software tools like spreadsheets and a lot of manual handling to coordinate the work then you will begin to see your capacity to take on jobs impacted which will reduce your business’s profitability in the long run.

This is why going with a digital platform that brings your core systems together is crucial for an operationally resilient business. By bringing together job creation, staff, customers, quoting, invoicing and scheduling into a robust job management software platform not only ticks the boxes in assessing operational resilience, but can save up to 14 hours a week in lost time to admin. Now that’s one great way to get your weekends back!

Whatever stage your business is at, GeoNext can help. We’ve put together a special offer for Tradie Wives members including:

  • 50% off GeoNext software licensing for three months
  • FREE one-on-one onboarding & training
  • Get started FREE for 14 days

>>>VISIT OUR TRADIE WIVES PAGE FOR 50% OFF GEONEXT<<<

No Comments

Post A Comment