How Benchmarking and Best Practices Can Improve Your Business
Business as usual is not working. With the various pressures that today’s systems integrators are experiencing, companies must look beyond what they’ve done before, because doing
the same thing and getting the same results no longer cuts it when markets are evolving so quickly.
The vision of NSCA’s partnership with Solutions360 is a simple one. Using NSCA’s Best Practices and Standards and Solutions360’s Business Management System will allow member companies to take a holistic approach to help improve all facets of their business. This is the opportunity to have line of sight into core business functions that will enable you to make more profitable business decisions.
Often what is missing in an industry is agreed upon standards or best practices and getting them widely adopted and followed. This challenge is what NSCA and Solutions360 have set out to overcome. How can our complementary offerings help an integrator’s business produce better, more accurate bids? How do they accurately forecast profit? How do they control costs during a job to match or improve expected margins? How do we help make them more competitive? How do we allow them to provide better customer service and project a professional appearance in the marketplace? These are the questions we set out to answer through this partnership available to you today.
This new resource and partnership with Solutions360 will provide you with the following benefits:
Most companies use some sort of analytics in their business, but very few deploy it across the organization; it’s just too difficult to tie together disparate data in a timely fashion. But better data analytics, more data across a broader spectrum results in the ability to make better, more informed decisions.
- Get a better understanding of clients’ profitability from every departmental interaction.
- Know what marketing and sales efforts produce the best clients.
- Find out where your productivity can be improved at the product line, branch office, department, etc. level.
Productivity
There are two main goals for most operations; to increase or maintain revenues and reduce costs. There are many areas you can focus on to affect both of these factors, but they all require decision-makers to gain control or predictability by reducing risk and having access to good information to base their decision on.
- Maximize margin on your material purchases by driving required dates from the project managers and ordering just in time across all projects.
- Track and manage employee productivity ensuring that a full day is accounted for, that more time is revenue focused, proper resources are dispatched and customers are billed accurately and efficiently for work performed.
Estimating and Bidding
Starting off with inaccurate labor estimates sets you up to lose before you’re even awarded the job. According to NSCA’s research, labor variables have become the single biggest risk factor for determining the true cost of each project. Thus NSCA has conducted a Labor Unit Survey and produced the Labor Installation Standard report to help prepare more accurate and successful estimates and bids. Solutions360 has taken this one step further and included these standards in their price lists and configurations, providing you the means to get this data into your bids, which carry over to your jobs and overall financials. We have closed the loop for you and provided full visibility into how your teams and overall business is doing.
Project Execution
With the first challenge of having accurate bids overcome, the next big hurdle is ensuring the budgeted profitability of a job actually follows through. This is best done by capturing inputs into the job, labor and material costs, accurately and in real-time. Not only can you keep the project on track, but you can find ways to improve on the delivery and increase margins.
- Accurately plan and deploy the correct resources.
- Cut down on paperwork and related delays and inaccuracy.
- Accurately manage internal and external change orders.
- Easily conduct project reviews that allow you to circle back to make improvements on future jobs
This partnership provides alignment that allows you to transform the way you do business; to compete, to measure growth, control costs, to make more informed decisions and to be more profitable. This is a unique opportunity to leverage a specialized configuration of this industry-specific business management software as the core of your business architecture
whether you are embarking on a search for new software or whether you are heavily vested in another less focused system, you owe it to the future of your business to look into this opportunity further to watch your profits increase.
