What we learned with Business Manager 365
Business Manager 365 has been a journey that started more than sixteen years ago when I needed a piece of software that allowed me to manage my customers service requests, simple idea, simple piece of software. I quickly learned be careful what you ask for because that simple idea took on a life of its own and grew into a process based business management piece of software that now helps solves simple and complex business problems.
Business Manager 365 has streamlined our work processes, exposed areas of improvement, and saved us thousands of dollars a year in operational overhead while maximizing our employee productivity.
The original idea around Business Manager 365 was simple, we are a service based business and our customers needed a method to report issues, track history, and for us to trend the client activity. As we started to refine that process, it became obvious that there were many operational issues around a growing service based business that needed to be addressed in order for us to grow aggressively.
As we looked to the future of how we wanted to run our business and spoke with industry experts, I evaluated a lot of software and a common theme emerged. I realized there is some great software out there, but there was not one really integrated piece of software that addressed ongoing business issues. There were several that worked together, but by my definition of integrated we simply could not find that elusive one piece of business management software that was fully integrated that automated business rules for small and medium size service based businesses.
As the software grew we decided we needed to take a bigger look at what our ultimate goals were for Business Manager 365. For me this was simple, I wanted a single piece of software that every employee- regardless of their role in the organization worked out of. We wanted one time data entry, a software to put in place work processes that followed desired business rules, automated notifications, escalations, and work process deviation intelligence. Business Manager 365 had to be both internal and external facing with the goal that if the client chose to they could actively manage us as their service provider in a proactive manner. However, one of the most important factors for Business Manager 365 was that we needed it to be so process driven that it allowed us to capture the intellectual knowledge of our clients that typically is lost when employees choose to leave the organization. The overall cost to replenish that brain drain required us to rethink how we managed our employees and our processes so that we didn’t have to reinvest in the learning process to discover what we didn’t know about our clients and their needs.
Employees are our most valuable asset; I think most business leaders would agree with that statement. They are the face of our organizations, they interact with our customers on a daily basis, and as a service based business building relationships with our clients is a key factor to our long term success. However, there is another aspect to the value of our employees and that is the value of the data that drives all businesses and the manner in which it is managed and accessed to drive the business processes forward. Business Manager 365 is designed to put employees into a work process that automatically sets triggers, measures performance, manages data, and makes it usable as well as accessible to decision makers. Business Manager 365 is continuously managing data, escalating data based tasks, trending performance data on the individual and the corporate level along with managing a quality assurance process that measures the happiness of the clients on a rolling basis.
As a business grows, you learn more and more about your own business needs as well as your client’s business needs. Business Manager 365’s development has been based on the discovery of real business requirements that growing businesses face. One big area of concern for us was what I call disassociated data, meaning data concerning contracts, customers, and documents to name a few. These are common areas where data could be disassociated in Excel files, or Word files, or in a completely different database. This is data that is isolated and removed from trending models and automated business tasks, so our goal was to bring all those data management points together to work directly out of Business Manager 365 and let the process of a normal workday drive the business and automate tasks that would historically be manual.
Sixteen years ago when I started the development of Business Manager 365 I was unaware of where it was going to lead me. It has been a continuous process of improvement, refinement and process management in order to design and software program that truly helps us grow and manage our business in a productive and streamlined manner that also allows us to manage our overhead costs. As our business has grown to include clients around the world, our ability to proactively manage our business requirements and our client’s business requirements would not have been possible without Business Manager 365.
About the author: Scott Lewis is the President and CEO of Winning Technologies Group of Companies which includes Liberty One Software. Scott has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry and is a nationally recognized speaker and author on technology subjects. Scott has worked with large and small business to empower them to use technology to improve work processes, increase productivity, and reduce costs. Scott has designed thousands of systems for large, medium and small companies and Winning Technologies’ goal is to work with companies on the selection, implementation, management and support of technology resources. Learn more about Winning Technologies at winningtech.com or call 877-379-8279.
