How the Best Businesses Stay ahead of the Pack
They stay in front by having good, accurate and timely information including:
- Balanced Scorecards – tailored to individual managers.
- Key Performance Indicators – tailored to individual managers and team leaders.
- Dashboards – tailored to individual managers and team leaders.
- Customer Analysis – to understand and stay on top of any changes in the market.
How do they do this?
The bigger businesses achieve it by employing Analysts and Commercial Managers.
The smaller businesses engage Business Advisors / Consultants to develop and write these models. If they do not have the required staff available to update the models on a monthly basis, then they will also contract the Business Advisor / Consultant to update them for them. Depending on the quality of the financial information these monthly updates will generally take between 2 to 8 hours to update.
Why do they do this?
Because good, accurate and timely information is the key to running a good business. Any change in the analysed information can identify where both good and bad trends are developing and therefore where management needs to focus its attention.
It should be noted that that these reports do not only contain financial information. They also reveal key analytical indicators such as utilisation, breakdowns, capacity constraints, delays in producing customer invoices, staff absences, etc.