Maybe you started your business in a small shop window, home office, or even the proverbial garage. But you’ve been busy developing your humble roots ever since and have noticed that things are getting harder to manage.
More orders, project additions, and new hires and structures require additional supervision and organization. For this reason, your growing business may need more technology and software to stay productive and efficient.
Technology and software extend and complement human capabilities to increase capabilities. With the help of specific applications, a growing organization doesn’t have to face so many growth problems.
Here is an overview of four software solutions to consider as your business grows.
1. Applications for project management
The benefit of a growing business is that it starts getting additional work. These projects involve additional income and other things to follow.
Prioritizing is usually not the hardest part of managing it all. It is knowing where each moving part is and keeping track of the various steps until completion. Another significant challenge is keeping up with changing priorities as workloads fluctuate.
While project management software will help your growing team keep up with workloads, it can also sort tasks by priority level.
Employees no longer need to manually sort and browse projects to select tasks to work on. In addition to priority levels, activities can also be classified according to severity.
Classifying work in this way allows employees to know if individual assignments have a critical impact on the project or if they are not all that important.
Filtering or sorting activities by priority and severity ensure that the most important work gets processed first. There is less chance of the team missing critical deadlines.
At the same time, the classification capabilities of project management software solutions help employees manage the backlog. Since the most important jobs are marked as completed, lower priorities can move to the top of the list.
2. Customer relationship management software
Businesses often grow due to the attractiveness of a product or service. This interest can develop within a single market, leading a company to diversify into related products or services.
A company’s offers may also prevail in neighboring markets. Both situations lead to the growth of the organization’s customer base and potential customers.
As leads and customers grow, sales and marketing teams need tools to manage them all. Customer relationship management software simplifies everything by separating prospects and customers into separate databases.
Sales teams can keep track of who they contacted and when. Employees can document the results of their outreach efforts and determine if follow-up is needed.
CRM solutions also have features that help sort potential and existing customers by type. Customers can be segmented by products or services, geographies, and levels of engagement or activity.
Marketing teams can track and automate email campaigns and create and separate contact lists for A / B testing. Marketers can still leverage these lists to redirect people to specific messages, including upgrade promotions.
3. Inventory management solutions
A survey by the US Census Small Business Pulse found that 36% of small businesses experienced delays in their national supply chain in 2021. Most of these disruptions occurred in manufacturing, construction, retail, and big business.
Without a way to keep track of your inventory, supply chain delays can become difficult to manage or anticipate. Knowing what doesn’t arrive on time can prevent you from starting sales initiatives for those products, preventing frustration from customers and employees. Meanwhile, promotions can highlight stock or leftover merchandise.
Inventory management solutions allow employees to see inventory levels in a retail or wholesale network. Estimated restock dates, supplier networks, and current production levels are all centralized.
Store and warehouse managers of a company’s operations can make smarter decisions by using inventory solutions.
They know when to back out of ordering certain products and when to ask for more. Because employees can see a company’s entire supply chain, they can better coordinate contingency plans in the event of a shortage or oversupply.
4. Human Resources Software
As a business develops, so does the number of its workers. More staff are needed to cater to the growing customer base and enable the fast and efficient delivery of products and services.
But just like a growing customer database, adding employees means more information to organize, monitor, and manage.
Assembling an HR department or hiring an HR manager can definitely help. A general rule is to create an HR department when you have about 50 employees.
However, it’s unrealistic to expect HR to track information about your workforce using spreadsheets or word processing software. Human resources need stronger solutions to operate effectively.
Employee management and human resource applications store staff member data, including salaries or hourly rates and important documents.
These software solutions also track vacation, sickness, vacation, and other benefits. Some apps allow HR departments to check and run payroll and enable employee self-service portals.
HR staff can focus on more strategic tasks as employees submit vacation requests, edit benefits, and access payroll themselves.
Expand your technology stack
Successful companies typically change their internal processes and tools as they grow. Hoping to do things the same way for a bigger scope is more than unreasonable.
This can prevent your expansion efforts from reaching their full potential. Adding software solutions such as project and employee management applications supports the evolution of your business. Thanks to these tools, your company will be able to better meet the expectations of customers and employees.
