In any business, there are certain key goals to aim for. Excluding non-profit organizations, one of the key goals is to maximize revenue streams and translate these into higher levels of profitability. Firms in all sectors may also strive to reduce staff turnover (and thus cut the associated recruitment costs that come from regularly hiring new starters) or seek to minimize wasteful processes in all parts of the firm. Gaining a larger market share and seeking to boost brand visibility and recognition are other key goals that many organizations strive for.
It is important to understand that improving the performance of your business can be a key driver to reaching many of these important business goals. A high-performing company typically makes every dollar count and delivers value across all facets of its operations. However, improving business performance can often take time and money, and the routes to these gains may not always be clear. Thankfully, this article sheds light on some key ways business performance can be improved. The tips described may be suitable for a wide range of businesses across many different sectors of industry.
Informed decision-making with BI platforms
Every organization must make high-level decisions throughout a typical business year. These can range from deciding whether to enter new markets, expand the business overseas, or take on new staff to form or grow a department of the firm. These decisions often require significant financial investment to achieve, and an element of risk is attached to any of these decisions. For example, overseas expansion plans may fail if the company does not gather sufficient market intelligence and finds that the products or services it intends to sell are already well provided for in the new market.
However, many high-level business decisions can be improved by emphasizing data-driven decision-making by using current market or company data. Increasingly, businesses are looking to use business intelligence platforms to take the uncertainty and risk out of making major decisions that will shape the firm’s future direction. BI platforms typically take high volumes of data from multiple sources.
It is then combined and analyzed with a degree of complexity that human statisticians could not achieve (or would be extremely time-consuming and costly to replicate). The information that is produced from this analysis can be quickly transformed into key insights and statistics that will help managers and leaders decide if the new plan will be successful. Put simply, BI platforms are now a vital component of high-level decision-making and can help to improve long-term business performance.
Monitor and manage your cloud systems
Millions of modern businesses have now made the move from locally based IT platforms, applications, and systems to cloud-based services. This allows a business to reduce IT maintenance costs, support a remote or hybrid workforce, and can often deliver business efficiency gains. As a business increases the number of cloud-based applications, it is vital to invest in a high-performing application programming interface (API) to allow seamless communication between applications and code that need to work together in the cloud.
This needs to be supplemented with the use of a high-performing API analytics platform. Simply put, this vital piece of technology will allow the effective monitoring of all a company’s cloud-based applications and gateways. Patterns can be spotted in the overall cloud traffic, which can help ensure that online security remains tight and the threats posed by cybercrime are minimized. In addition, poorly performing applications can be immediately highlighted, modified, and re-launched back into the cloud environment with efficiency gains.
Perpetual staff feedback channels
As a final top tip for improving business performance, it is vital to consider the insights that can come from all areas of your workforce. Workers at all levels of the firm will likely be specialists in key areas of business operations. Managers and leaders need to regularly ask for staff feedback on the processes, tasks, and projects undertaken to ascertain if more productive methods can be adopted. In addition, many staff will have ideas for service improvement that are based on their years of experience within the firm or the sector in general.
Any company needs to have open channels of communication between staff and senior managers so that ideas can be shared, and the business can become more productive. A key way to achieve this is by producing online staff surveys that can be completed and returned by email. In addition, it is beneficial for businesses to have a dedicated (and regularly checked) email address that is specifically for service improvement ideas.