Five key benchmarks to grow your margins and accelerate time-to-market

When seeking to keep your business running efficiently, it can be an overwhelming task striving to remain ahead of the game. There are five consistent benchmarks that all successful companies adhere to and seek to improve in our experience. Keeping up with competitors, increasing your bottom line, and staying relevant in the market can all be achieved easily, as long as you focus on these five key benchmarks.

Key benchmarks for success

Improving efficiency

Businesses that survive their competitors always seek to be more efficient, directly linked to reduced operational costs. After all, inefficiencies can cost a business 20%-30% of its annual revenues. In addition to this, staying compliant both in a corporate and regulatory sense ensures a smooth transition to market.

There are many ways to improve your day-to-day business tasks to be more efficient – and there are many tools and solutions to help you do just that. One of the best ways is by transforming your business from manual to automated processes.

Professionals spend 50% of their time manually searching for information (an average of 18 minutes to locate each document). While this is a time-consuming process, it is necessary, especially for heavily regulated industries. Content automation helps you efficiently compile, review, and retire complex documents that would otherwise take up a tremendous amount of time. It also allows you to remain compliant with necessary business tasks without spending as much time and resources on them.

For example, manufacturing records books, or MRBs, are imperative in the oil and gas industry. They record the materials, processes, and companies involved in the process of producing specific products. These documents are essential, and they can take weeks or months to compile. To further complicate the problem, customers require MRBs for each order that goes out.

Through Global Cents’ solution, companies have found solace in automating their document creation and review processes. What used to be a time-consuming and resource-heavy task is now something that takes a few days under the GCI solution.

Improving product quality

When producing and selling products, quality is essential to keeping a loyal customer base. If your standard goes down or is not keeping up with your competitors, the company is in grave danger of losing clients and revenue to its competitors. Giving quality management the attention it deserves can become seemingly impossible when your staff spends their time focusing on manual, unautomated tasks.

Producing and maintaining the documentation required for each project and sale is an excellent example of this kind of issue. Like with MRBs, if you need an excessive amount of staff and time to focus on creating and publishing these documents, quality can easily slip through the cracks. Automating these processes will improve product and service quality, giving you more time to ensure your documentation is accurate, your products are well received, and your customers are happy.

For example, the GCI automation process can query external platforms such as SAP to generate a file containing the serial numbers and batch numbers that make that product. From there, the process passes the file to your content management system. After that, the solution compiles the relevant documentation. Virtual links are available to ensure a single source of the truth. If there are any missing documents, GCI’s solutions notify the appropriate staff. Not focusing on these processes and using automation means that staff is available for more critical and profitable tasks.

Reducing business, product, or mission cycle times

Every organization undertaking involves multiple processes that make up a cycle. Speeding up any one of those processes increases the cycle’s speed and ultimately how fast your product or service can get to market. Businesses that deliver quicker than their competitors are the ones that ultimately succeed.

Attempting to track and manage your business cycles manually leads to overloaded resources, mistakes, and missing critical information. One example is automating your documentation processes resulting in optimizing these cycle times. Making this point even more precise, Forester stated that companies who master their operations’ automation would dominate their industries.

As discussed in the previous example, GCI’s solutions can automate the document identification and retrieval process. Without this automation, organizations could spend weeks or months tracking down the documentation and assembling it in the correct order. These weeks or months delay the completion of this process which causes downstream supply-chain issues. Deploying automation avoids all of these issues.

Improving control and visibility

Understanding and influencing the way that your business operates enables it to be agile in its approach. Agility allows the company to adapt to changing market conditions more, capitalize on opportunities faster, and appeal to their customers in new and exciting ways.

For industries that rely on large amounts of content, automation does not mean that you lose control over your documentation but instead improves those documents’ control and visibility. GCI Controlled Document Lifestyle (CDL) provides a combination of digital processes and tools with which you can optimize your document lifecycle management process. Through this approach, GCI significantly reduces the time and resources required for controlled document management processes.

For example, consider that your company receives product requests from two different customers. Each customer has specific requirements that are different from one another. Using CDL, you can create a template for each customer that outlines their documentation specifications, preferences, and submission requirements. Using these templates, you can now take advantage of time savings the next time these customers order, improving your submission quality and accuracy.

Continuous improvement and optimization

No business achieves success by remaining stagnant. Increasing the profit your business generates is not always about increasing sales – you can also cut down on the costs and productivity associated with producing those sales. Forrester predicts that automation is one of the best ways to decrease operating costs, cutting up to 90%. Without a significant focus on how you can improve and what areas your business model needs to improve, your competitors are likely to overtake you.

Today, new improvements are constantly available, and new versions often cause your systems and processes to become obsolete. However, introducing new tools, improvements and versions can cause disruptions to your operations and procedures. GCI PowerTools for Deployments tackles this challenge effectively by enabling you to quickly deploy incremental improvements to your platform with minimal disruption to your people or processes.

It enables you to quickly, accurately, and automatically copy any Content Suite object directly between environments and migrate more types of CS objects than any other tool. Also, you can gradually introduce small changes that improve your overall efficiency while making it easier for your users to embrace.
Over time, businesses that can implement continuous improvement and optimization without disrupting their systems or encountering user resistance will have the edge over their competitors. In essence, minor, continuous improvements gradually add up to make a big difference to any company’s bottom line.

Choose GCI Solutions

If your business plan does not include directing time and energy towards improvement, you will likely fall behind in the market. Competitors will take over, and your business might fall flat. Through automation of processes within areas that are standardized within your business allows you to put more focus on optimization and improvement in other areas.

Considering that automation supports all five business success benchmarks, it is most definitely a step in the right direction. GCI’s solutions allow you to automate these processes seamlessly and effectively. By automating essential documentation which supports your products and services, GCI also saves on time and resources. In conjunction with this, GCI helps you understand where you need to improve and optimize your business model. If you would like to find out more, visit our product page, or check out this case study of how GCI enhanced a global energy company’s business functions.