Business Automation – For Manufacturers and Traders

Are you a manufacturer or trader? Generally, such business owners are firefighting with daily managerial tasks of business operations and could not focus on the growth of the Business. You need to automate your business to increase efficiency, and to improve productivity.

Let’s see the challenges you must be facing in your business operations:

What are the challenges Manufacturers and Traders are facing in their business?

1. Delayed Orders: Due to the micro-management of orders you lose track of all the orders and get in difficult situations with customers when they ask for the updates. This affects the trust of clients.
2. Poor Team Performance: Your team tends to forget 3 out of 10 tasks assigned by you. There is no proper system of delegating the tasks with deadlines and sending them reminders to complete it.  This lack of task delegation system slows down the work and progress.
3. Low Sales Conversion: The improper management of leads and delayed follow-ups with them, result in low sales conversions. You manage everything on excel files which are quite lazy to maintain and update regularly and you don’t remember the current status of leads and you lose them.
4. Inconsistent Inventories: At times, you end up purchasing the same products/raw materials that are already lying in your warehouse. This is due to unavailability of proper systems to manage your inventories and track them.
5. Poor Cash Flow: You are not able to track your revenue, expenses and overall cash flow. Here, you need a proper revenue and Payments & Expense Management systems to send an automated payment reminder to your clients with adequate follow ups.
6. Frequent Firefighting: You mostly indulge in fire-fighting with your employees, vendors and clients for follow-ups and dependencies. This wastes a lot of time, energy and effort that can be instead invested in a growth oriented activity.
7. Poor Leads: Due to lack of knowledge on how to generate leads using social media platforms and Websites. You don’t generate quality leads which lowers your lead conversion rate.

These are common challenges that you might be facing, but what is the solution for this? Let’s check out how digital systems and Google Workspace can come to your rescue:

1. Data Masters: Business Automation includes 3 steps - Data Collection, Data Management & Business Reporting. Using Google Forms & Google Sheets you can start managing: 

• Order Master for order management. 
• Item Master to manage your products. 
• Vendor Master to keep your vendor’s information and updates. 
• Customer Master to keep your client’s data.

2. Automated Systems: You need automated systems to give you reminders, to send emails, for regular follow-ups and real-time updates. Using Google Forms and Google Sheets you can create: 

• Lead Tracking system for regular Lead Follow-ups. 
• Inventory Tracking system to monitor your stocks and required purchases. 
• Task Management tool to delegate tasks to your employees and take regular updates from them. 
• Order Tracking tool to track the current status of all the orders whether they are delivered on time or delayed.
• Payment Tracking tool to keep track of all the amounts receivables & amount payables, and to send automated payment reminders to your clients, vendors, etc. 

3. Business Reporting: Reports are the basis of strategy making and future planning. You need day to day reporting to analyze the strong part and weak part of your business, so that you can focus and optimize it. Key reports that every business owner must follow are:

• Sales Report: For keeping track and comparing your sales at a given time to figure out the key areas and locations where you need to focus to grow sales.
• Order Report: It will help you to keep track of the current status of all the orders without much following up with your operations team. You can send your deliverables on time without irritating the client.
• Customer Service: To check all the queries/complaints of your clients and prospects, that you can revert on time.
• Quality Check Reports: To monitor the quality of your products and services on all the parameters and standard values.
• Inventory Reports: To keep record of all the products and raw items at your disposal.

Now you know what you need to resolve your shortcomings and daily fire-fighting. So, the next question is how to implement these solutions? 

Let’s see how can we automate our operations to systemize your business:

Google workspace has made the automation process simpler and cost-effective. Using Google applications such as Google Forms, Google Sheets & Google Dashboard, you can very easily create the above mentioned systems and tools for real-time updates. Learn more on how to build systems for your business.