Focusing on Long-term Revenue Building

Too much focus and diligence to clear short-term debt can force companies to postpone their long-term growth plans indefinitely. This is a common occurrence, especially among small and mid-sized businesses. Growing companies, including small businesses, are always strapped for cash. Short-term debt reconciliation can lead to low month-end or quarterly cash flows, making it difficult for companies to think of opportunities beyond their current state of business. Another factor to keep in mind is the customer and how much companies are doing to invest in successful customer engagement strategies. Capital (capex) and operational (opex) expenses can lower a company’s chances to accumulate cash at the end of the quarterly or yearly business cycles. This limitation in cash reserves can slow down a company’s progress in getting hold of and maintaining a solid customer base. A lot of money, time, and effort is needed to keep customers engaged and interested in your products and services. In fact, long-term growth and success is determined by how you manage your customers. The downside for many growing companies is that they do not have the liquidity to expand business when the time is right.

One way to quickly set things right and transition from short-term debt reconciliation to long-term strategic thinking is by changing how business is done at the operational level — that is in the office. Forward-looking companies have always managed to get their most cumbersome, manually-driven processes streamlined. And a good way to achieve that is through technology. Intelligent automation and other advanced automation technologies can transform routine business processes to function with little manual intervention. Intelligent automation removes the burden companies have from having to meet short-term obligations and focus more on strategizing for long-term growth. For companies struggling to get business, shifting the focus, labor, and time away from mundane, repetitive work can help contain operating costs and improve cash flows for other investment opportunities. Intelligent automation not just mobilizes business at the operational level but necessarily gets business off the ground.

These technologies in combination provide a powerful data capture and process automation solution to process the most repetitive, document-dependent tasks in a typical office including accounts payable, sales order processing, medical claims processing, mailrrom operations etc. Streamlining these document-intensive processes helps companies lower their dependence on manpower to get mission critical work done. Also, companies can save considerable cash by automating routine, repetitive processes that take up manpower, office space, and time that can be better present on strategic growth initiatives. The immediate advantages of intelligent automation can be felt in many different areas of business:

Customer Relationships: intelligent automation can be used to streamline these channels of engagement that help deliver the products and services to customers. For instance, by automating sales order processing, companies are in a better position to accelerate the delivery of orders to customers. This lowers the order fulfillment cycle times and helps meet customer expectations faster. Also, intelligent automation software is useful in consolidating customer data on a single platform, making it very easy for users to pull up customer information when they are attending to a customer grievance call. The software aligns all activity required to reach out to a customer first, and helps engage with customers better and improve relationships.

Focus on Strategic Growth Initiatives: a lot of time and effort is spent on resolving everyday office chores. What companies need to realize is that there is a lot of hidden savings in routine, document-intensive processes. By automating and streamlining these processes, there is scope to redirect skilled staff to work on more growth-oriented initiatives. Process transparency and visibility are two important advantages that companies gain by automating document-dependent processes. A visible end-to-end process chain can give companies insights on the current state of operations and the necessary improvements they can implement on specific tasks.

For instance, by knowing that a delay in receiving invoices from vendors is causing a delay in payments, and in turn, a sudden shortage of cash surplus or mismanagement of funds will help companies intimate the same to vendors, and re-strategise the way they manage payables. Sound accounts payable management will in turn improve cash flows and help companies lower instances of sudden cash shortage at the end of the payments cycle. Process implementation best practices such as these help companies strategize for process improvement, accelerated business, and as a result, optimal revenue generation.

Tap into Newer Market Segments: abundant cash obtained from optimizing routine, repetitive processes can be used to target newer markets through various marketing initiatives. Businesses can invest the surplus funds obtained from savings on manpower and operating costs on brand awareness campaigns including digital and email marketing, SEO marketing, partnerships, technology events, trade council memberships, etc. and anything that helps elevate the company’s image and visibility in newer consumer segments. This can in turn lower customer acquisition costs, and revitalize sales and revenues for companies.

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