A business is like a machine. It has levers that need to be pulled, cogs that align, rotate and convert and transfer value from one point to another. Like machines, businesses need regular maintenance and care to remain functioning. For very small businesses, the operator is generally capable of carrying out all these functions themselves. They can reach all the levers, there are few cogs, and maintenance and upkeep is relatively simple.
As a business continues to grow and grow, there comes a point where the interactions between the different parts of the business become so complex and interrelated that it can grow no more. The addition of more systems and processes at one point would overstress another part of the business. The value levers would be too far apart to be pulled effectively in unison. The cost of compliance soon outweighs the value the business is able to generate. At this point, the business has reached its technical limit of growth. The business is complicated and unwieldy.
Einstein once famously wrote – to paraphrase – that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Upon reaching its technical limit of growth, a business has only two options; to become complicated, or to simplify. With increased ‘complicatedness’ comes additional cost and effort but not growth. Such is the relationship that productivity and growth diminish rapidly with growing complicatedness. With increased simplicity on the other hand, businesses can unlock value they didn’t know they had access to.
Greater simplicity means less time spent controlling process, managing systems, monitoring compliance and administering governance. Not only does greater simplicity free up time and resources to concentrate on the core business, it also provides the conditions necessary to create deeper customer connections and better user experiences.
While all of this is well and good on paper, bringing this simplicity to life and reaping the benefits is historically hit and miss in the small to medium business space. Many businesses persevere with poorly defined or informal processes. They make do with disconnected data and retrospective ‘descriptive’ insights which identify ‘what’ happened but not why. Done well however, businesses are able to simplify their enterprise application landscape and connect their myriad data sources to understand not only why something has happened, but when something will happen and even what to do about in the future.
This can include insights around how your customers are experiencing your product or service and how to retain them more effectively. It can include insights on how to improve employee satisfaction, reduce churn and increase innovation. It can even include insights on how to integrate more effectively and efficiently with your suppliers to reduce your total cost to serve and generate long-term strategic supplier partnerships.
While there are a number of avenues that can help to achieve this insight-driven environment, the easiest and most effective is to implement a single, whole-of-business management system. SAP Business One provides for the needs of all your departments from one solution, offering industry templates that can be customised to suit the individual requirements of your business. It can harness the impressive power of SAP HANA analytics utilising in-memory computing to deliver real-time analysis and reporting. And as a solution tailored to drive growth in small to medium businesses, SAP Business One is affordable, rejects complexity with a modular and flexible structure, and can be implemented in days or weeks.
The environment for small to medium businesses seeking growth has never looked better. While the challenges of creating truly excellent customer experiences and retaining an increasingly intelligent and connected workforce are great, those who rise to the challenge stand to achieve great things.
As a top-tier SAP Partner, when you connect with us you’re provided with local expertise just moments away. Book in from a practical discussion with us on whether SAP Business One is suitable for your business and what it would mean for you to adopt it – including the benefits, cost, systems migration and implementation. Alternatively, schedule a virtual demo with us to what SAP Business One can do.
