Plan Right for Your Business with Sage Mobile Apps

March 27th 2018 15:06:05 PM

Today’s businesses have a lot to manage. Sage mobile apps help you bring all the aspects of your business together, including your sales, field service, shop floor, warehouse, and office, so you can gain full insight and plan for your strategic, tactical, and operational advances.

Start planning your business’s future with power and confidence when you contact Scanco online or give us a call at (330) 645-9959.

The Importance of Business Planning

Often, business leaders are too busy to thoroughly plan for their ongoing success. Considering how much time it takes to run a business on a day-to-day basis, it’s not surprising that you likely haven’t had the chance to make a full growth plan in a while—especially one for which you’ve created detailed steps toward your goals.

However, you’ve heard it before, and we’ll remind you of it again: Without a plan and a goal, you won’t know whether you’ve achieved success.

Making plans (and sticking to them) is a critical part of ongoing business growth, and Sage mobile apps can help you streamline your planning process with in-depth data on demand.

Let’s walk through how your planning process could look if you used Sage mobile apps to help you.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is probably the most common form of planning. It involves coming up with a high-level idea of what you want to do by a certain time period. For instance, you may want to increase revenues by 5% by the end of Q2.

Though strategic planning should be your first planning step, it is by no means your first step in the overall planning process. Before you can come up with an idea of what you want to achieve later, you must know where you stand now. That means you need to collect data.

Sage mobile apps offer easy-to-use tools for your entire company to use, including your sales, field service, warehouse, and manufacturing teams, so that you can collect the data you need to plan properly for the future. By using a mobile app to complete their work, your team will generate comprehensive, real-time data you can use to gain insight into your labor performance, inventory levels, slow-selling items, service customer trends, and more.

Having this information at your fingertips will give you the high-level view you need to make high-level plans.

Tactical Planning

Tactical planning is the second stage of the process, in which you come up with a few ideas of how you could accomplish your high-level goals. For instance, if you want to increase revenues by 5% by Q2, you may plan to increase production or increase sales.

To succeed in this planning stage, you need good information about your company’s performance trends. It’s all well and good to tell your sales team that they need to sell more, but if sales are down because you can’t produce goods fast enough to sell, your talented salespeople may feel like they’ve been given an impossible task. Similarly, if production can’t increase because you’re out of warehouse space for unsold inventory, it would be foolish to try to make your workers make more before you started clearing out space.

Sage mobile apps can help with this process because they offer a real-time, single-source view of all your data, which feeds directly into your Sage 100 system. From sales to the shop floor to updated counts, you’ll be able to quickly and easily identify strengths and issues in your current operations, so you can make appropriate, achievable plans for growth.

Operational Planning

The final stage in your planning process consists of making detailed plans and mini-goals for your company and team. These mini-goals keep you on track because you’ll always know the next step. Operational plans also supply an early warning system that can help you identify and overcome hiccups early or adjust plans accordingly if you’re succeeding faster than you thought you would.

For instance, if you decide to increase sales to increase revenues, you may wish to increase quotas for all your sales people by a compounded 1.5% per quarter. Then, to get your sales people to sell better, you decide to send them all to a sales conference. If the advice from the conference helps your team increase sales by a compounding 3% each quarter, you’ll want to adjust your end-of-the-year goals, so you keep the momentum going.

This stage requires the most granular information, delivered in the fastest manner possible. That’s because this stage is the one in which your company gets to prove how agile you are. In today’s business landscape, agility is the name of the game; companies that cannot pivot to respond to quicksilver market conditions aren’t likely to survive in the long term.

By placing Sage mobile apps in each of your team member’s hands, you’ll have the detailed, instantaneous data you need to track and respond to changes quickly and effectively. This means you’ll be able to adjust plans accordingly to keep your strategic plans on track, and it also means you’ll be able to reward your great employees in a timely manner.

Addressing setbacks and rewarding achievements quickly are the keys to lasting business progress and employee happiness. In fact, when you can manage to keep your company moving forward while ensuring that your workers are happy and productive, you probably won’t have to plan for increased revenues. They’ll come with the territory.

Achieve Business Satisfaction with a Sage Mobile App

From sales to the shop floor or warehouse; from a job site out in the field to a desk in the back office, every person in a modern company must have on-demand access to integrated, real-time, accurate information at all times in order to meet their goals.

Scanco can help you get the access you need … using tools everyone on your team already has.

Curious to learn more? Contact Scanco online or at (330) 645-9959 to speak with a warehouse or manufacturing expert about how the Sage mobile app could help your company.

For nearly 30 years, Scanco has helped distributors and manufacturers leverage easy-to-use solutions to gain real-time insight into their business processes. This insight has empowered our clients to pull ahead of their competitors by increasing efficiency and driving better performance across their operations.