After consulting to more than 2,000 Australian businesses about how they can use technology to increase their profitability, WorkGuru's founders had developed a strong understanding of where things go wrong, and where the easy wins are. When developing the WorkGuru platform, they had a clear idea of what businesses needed from a business management tool to extract the most value.
Consolidate Your Technology
In the constant pursuit of more efficiency businesses of all sizes often accumulate a range of systems, technologies, and processes. While essential at the time of their development or purchase, many of these systems quickly become cumbersome and the source of huge inefficiency.
The overuse and reliance on Microsoft Excel to track inventory, time, projects, and money are often one of the worst mistakes a business can make. Inevitably, your spreadsheets get larger, more complex, and less user friendly as your business grows. Worse, your spreadsheets let you fiddle with numbers that you don’t like, and they don’t show you the true picture.
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Eventually, importing and exporting data and integrating your spreadsheets with other spreadsheets takes up more and more time. One of the easiest ways for a business to improve profitability is focusing on using data, not compiling data.
Consolidating all of your business’s non-accounting data into a single, user-friendly platform that everyone in your business can use is the easiest way to do away with the scourge of Excel (and almost all other technology your business might be using!).
As a simple, whole-of-business solution WorkGuru will not only remove the cost and inefficiencies of your legacy systems, but also help you identify a whole new range of ideas to improve your operations.
Real-Time Transparency
Many manufacturing businesses do not have accurate insight into individual project costs and revenues. Often, the more complex the problem, the greater the confusion.
Whether it is on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, many businesses simply rely on the fact the ‘whole’ business is profitable, without a clear understanding of what individual projects are making (or losing!).
WorkGuru lets users would be able to have a very granular understanding of every cost that goes into a project. This high level of transparency into the actual cost of inventory, labour, and other inputs into each project is critical to ensuring that each job that goes out the door is making you money.
WorkGuru’s live WIP reporting tells you at any stage exactly how much work you’ve done, but haven’t billed clients yet. Timesheets and stock usage are fed real-time into our reporting, meaning that there’s no need to wait until the end of the month to know where you stand.
Effective Inventory Management
Inventory management is one of the great challenges for manufacturing businesses. Having just the right amount of something is critical to delivering projects on-time and on-budget. Having too much inventory can cost you money in additional storage and tracking expenses, having too little of something can cost you time, resulting in projects being delivered late.
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There is no big secret to managing your inventory effectively and efficiently. It takes a good understanding of your business’s needs and requirements and mapping that to detailed forecasting.
WorkGuru’s project templates have been specifically designed to allow users to accurately account for your inventory with a detailed bill of materials. These individual project inventory requirements can then be matched against your overall stock to create an accurate picture.
Limit Staff Downtime
Limiting staff downtime, or the “Lost Hours”, is a key way to increase your profit in any business, particularly manufacturing.
Of course, every business wants to have every employer undertaking productive work for every moment they are being paid. While this may be impractical and unrealistic, minimising the amount of downtime is one of the best ways to improve profit.
While a good culture underpinned by strong communication and individual accountability is the first step to reducing downtime, understanding where your employees are spending their time is just as critical.
WorkGuru overcomes the challenge of managing downtime using a web kiosk that allows all your staff to enter their timesheets and material usage straight onto whatever project they are working on. This means no more double-entry of timesheets for payroll and separate timesheets for project management meaning, AND real-time reporting on staff productivity.
Once you have finished an individual project you will have full transparency of who worked on the project and when. This data is critical to identifying where and when you have downtime, and developing strategies to improve productivity and profits.
These are just four of the many ways WorkGuru can help increase your profit. Talk to our Sales Team today or request a demonstration to find out how we can get your business back on track.
