The end of the fiscal year marks a time of reflection and a chance for businesses to set forth tactics and goals to boost performance and profitability. As the end of the fiscal year approaches, it is critical for businesses to determine what initiatives where successful, as well as what were financial weights in order to create strategic operational goals that will result in increased revenues and reduced costs in the next year. Here are four things every business should do right now to ensure that it ends the year profitable.
- Review What Worked, What Didn’t, and Your Resources
Executives should review the past year’s goals to determine which goals were reached and which were not reached. Executives must communicate with—and recognize—their employees in order to gain actionable feedback on the operations of the company. There is a lot to gain from company-wide discovery sessions where employees and executives can discuss what processes or procedures lead to success and which were challenging and collaborate on what actions should be taken in the future. Futhermore, reviewing the allocation of resources enables industry leaders to verify what machines and technologies are being used and how effectively. A fiscal year-end review entails examining the entire organization and how machines, data, and people function together, which enables executives to implement a biomodal approach when planning for the next year.
- Analyze Your Big Data
Within a business’s data systems lies powerful information about your customers, transactions, and operations. Even so, many businesses have not discovered or utilized their big data to their advantage. The only way to evaluate what goals were successful is to analyze historic transactions, inventories, and revenues and statistically interpret what purchasing and behavioral trends resulted. Predicitve analytics involves using programed or “trained” computers to evaluate various data sets to generate reports that identify trends, customer behaviors, and assess risk. High-asset movers, in every industry, use data analytics to improve business rules, forecast inventory and customer purchases, develop new markets, and manage risk. What’s more, the new bimodal business model desginates humans to work alongside machines to design operational, logistical, and customer-interaction processes that learn from existing behavior and constantly improves based on the data from the processes. Therefore, using data analytics is not a fiscal year-end practice, but a constant opportunity for growth and improvement.
- Plan Then Execute.
Setting next year’s goals is the easy part—increase profit margin, develop into new markets, cross-product sell, enhance product and service—but developing strategic, actionable plans is the nitty gritty part of goal setting. Now is the time to take what was learned from last year and use the knowledge gained from data analytics to set goals for the new fiscal year. Generate each step, process, or action that executives and employees must execute in order to reach—or exceed—goals. Set bigger goals that will generate a larger income, but also ensure the goals set are reasonable and on target. If employees have the mentality that their goals are unattainable, they will not strive for excellence or become sloppy in executing their specific plan of actions. In addition, while large sales may be a “home run,” encourage smaller “base hit” sales, which can happen everyday. Multiple small sales form the drivers of profitable revenue growth, plus, builds employees’ confidence so they are more prepared to take advantage of “home run” opportunities when they do come along. Plus, that extra time that an employee may spend with a customer fosters long-lasting relationships, customer loyality, and even up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Building on successes, and learning from failures puts the company in a position of power.
- Increase Efficiency While Reducing Costs.
In today’s economy, the ultimate success of a company depends on efficiency. Year after year, one recurring goal is to do more with fewer resources. Technology has provided great advancements over the current century and businesses are beginning to be more open to adopting new technologies in order to increase their productivity and efficiency. However, one large complexity organizations face in a world dictated by consumerization is the variety of user interfaces that must be supported by applications and programs of all types. Information technology and operations managers desire technologies that will fully integrate with their existing systems in order to increase productivity and efficiency—not create more work for them. In the recent years, organizations have leveraged what’s known as, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology which creates a Return On Investment (ROI), immediately such as FoxTrot by EnableSoft. Upgrading several applications can be costly, but implementing one application that can be leveraged for many processes and works with current user applications and databases becomes very cost-effective.
Setting new fiscal year goals to increase productivity and efficiency, encourage and empower employees to be successful, and generate new and bigger revenue than last year puts businesses on a trajectory of growth and financial enhancement.
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Richard Milam is the Founder and CEO of EnableSoft Incorporated. As an early innovator in the Robotic Process Automation space, Orlando, Florida-based EnableSoft Inc. has helped organizations save time, save money, and improve productivity. Serving over 500 corporate clients worldwide, EnableSoft develops and markets Foxtrot, software that eliminates the burden of manual data processes by behaving, deciding, and working just like a person. Prior to founding EnableSoft, in 1995, Richard was a partner and Senior Vice President of FiTech PLUSmark, and held other positions in Information Technology, Operations, and Sales.