Data is the most valuable resource for any business, as it can be used to boost productivity, increase earnings, and control costs at any stage of the production and sales cycle. Today, we will talk about how proper data management and process automation can be beneficial for business growth.

Implement industry-specific tracking of employees workload and efficiency

In many industries tracking employees' workload and efficiency are both crucial elements of business success and a tricky thing to implement. Take a service business, when employees are engineers fixing equipment that may be located at the customer's venue, plant, or other location.

In such a case, the evaluation of the simple task of replacing a detail of equipment should be accompanied by the analysis of the time spent to get to the customer and return.

So, to correctly evaluate the workload for the specific employee, you need to account for not only the number of processed orders but geodata as well. To do so, you will need a business automation software that is capable of handling this kind of data.

Vendors and service companies also need to implement a service history tracking to be able to access the information about the products' warranty service, diagnostics, and its dates. To solve these tasks, such companies need to implement proper serial numbers and replacement parts accounting and management.

1C:Drive is such a solution tailored to service companies' needs and supports the detailed service workflow.

Support flexible corporate structure for cross-border commerce

Small and medium businesses' globalization is a worldwide trend right now. Several years ago only big enterprises can have multiple growth points and regions with physical offices, however nowadays the company of about 100 employees may easily have 3-5 offices in different cities, countries and even continents.

When the business involves the production and servicing of customers in multiple countries, it may be necessary to run different legal entities to manage this process. One company may be used to deal with customs. Another is created for handling sales. The third legal entity may be dedicated to service tasks, etc.

Building and managing such a structure is not an easy thing to do. The business has not only correctly understood what goods, when, and where were sent, but track prices and transactions between controlled legal entities. These transactions may be in different currencies, and prices of the same goods may be different for different customers, regions, etc.

Also, companies often use different pricing policies for different countries; however, from the management point of view, it is necessary to be able to account all profit in a single currency.

Multi-company feature of 1C:Drive allows to create any number of legal entities to conduct business operations, and accordingly track all transactions, and overall profitability of business processes.

Save time and money via correct automation

Sometimes even a slight change in business processes may result in significant savings of time and money. This is especially evident in some industries, like construction and production.

For example, there are cases when companies that sell construction materials were able to push down the cost of materials delivery by implementing storage for delivery prices provided by different transportation companies and using this data for automated supplier selection. This approach allows savings up to 15-25% on delivery only.

For production purposes, proper data management can also result in significant optimization. If you know exactly what you have in stock and integrate this data into your production process, you can speed up order processing times. For example, if the design software (CAD) gives out a precise specification of the final product, but all the components are not in stock, you can either order missing parts and wait for them, or find the replacement for them. If you know that there are some excellent replacements that do not lower the quality of the product, you can process the order right away, and save lots of time.

To be able to do this, you'll need a comprehensive automation system with inventory management, lot tracking, and warehouse functionality, which is implemented in 1C:Drive.

Plan demand and control warehouse for increased profits

For any retail business, the demand planning and warehouse control are critical elements for growing profits. If you run out of goods of high demand while there are too many goods of a different type that you can't sell fast, this will result in indirect losses.

The company should understand what amount of goods of different types there should be in stock, what the current balance is, to either order more products or run specialized marketing campaigns to sell the overstock items.

This is especially important for complex products, where the only item can have hundreds or even thousands variants of implementation. For example, a suit (tissue, size, height), or metal (size, steel type, strength), etc. For such products, it is crucial to segment the most popular parameters and their combinations to use this information when forming orders for new shipments.

The variant management and production planning features of 1C:Drive allows companies to understand what the current situation is, plan their stock provisioning, and control the warehouse.