Systemizing Knowledge to Future-Proof your Business

The business world is ever-changing, with an increasing number of challenges for organizations to deal with daily, such as labor shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. To stay competitive, businesses need to innovate and shake up the way they run things, as the old ways no longer cut it.

As your business scales, it’s important to start thinking about systemizing the knowledge that powers your business. There are multiple benefits to having your processes systemized and not reliant on specific people, and especially in today’s dynamic world. Knowledge helps your business navigate resource movement and supply chain changes – a task that becomes increasingly more complex and to manage as the business grows.

Systemizing your business essentially involves defining how your business systems should run, and converting employee knowledge into process information in a system that is easily accessible by other employees. While initially implementing the system may take some time, the benefits and time-savings are manyfold.

Some benefits of systemized knowledge include:

Ensures no knowledge is lost

While of course systemizing helps increase business efficiencies and reduce operational costs, but the real benefit it about retaining knowledge. An ageing workforce can leave a significant skills gap in the company, and as vital employees leave, they take their knowledge with them, unless there’s already a system in place to retain and utilize it.

You need to capture that before they retire to prevent organizational knowledge attrition. Having the knowledge easily accessible means that the next employee can hit the ground running, instead of needing to spend time establishing information to be able to do their job, taking up time that could instead be spent on moving the business forward.

Enables employees to work more efficiently

In today’s highly competitive global environment your customers want complex quotation details turned around fast! To meet profit expectations consistently, organizations need to deliver accurate information on time.

Systemized data allows for “non-expert” employees to complete tasks that used to require an expert in the space, e.g. “Who knows all the best suppliers for commodity ‘X’?” If the knowledge is easily accessible in the system, then employees can immediately look up the answer, instead of relying on a particular resource, or worse, guesswork. This speeds up the time it takes the employee to complete the task and get back to the customer, and frees up precious time for the expert as well.

A shared knowledge system also allows teams to share documents and attribute information on suppliers, customers, both internal and external, for full visibility by all users to improve decision-making. As they can access the needed information, “non-expert” employees can complete their job to the best of their ability, spending their efforts in negotiating better contracts, not chasing information.

Promote organization-wide consistency

With today’s global marketplace, leveraging low-cost suppliers in countries around the world has made the business of sourcing products and services increasingly more complex and challenging. Accessing and communicating with vendors globally also means a lot of work for procurement professionals. The smallest inconsistency can result in dramatic repercussions to your fiscal results.

With the same information available to everyone, employees are working with one set of standardized data, ensuring consistency and accuracy organization-wide. They aren’t relying on assumptions or with outdated information that could lead to job errors.

Keeps your business up to speed with competition

In today’s highly competitive global environment your customers want complex quotation details turned around fast! To meet profit expectations consistently, organizations need to deliver accurate information on time. Without information on time spent, risk areas, bottlenecks, etc., metrics are often hard to generate and inaccurate. With up-to-date system information, organizations can build metrics to improve process performance, analyze information to assess business, sales, and investment performance. An added bonus is if your system integrates with other business/enterprise systems to further enhance your quote management activities.

With your organization laid out for you to see and analyze, managers can easily see how the business today is operating, and what changes can be made to further streamline and improve processes to help maximize revenue.

Empowers customers

When customers know what to do, how to do it, what to expect and why, they’re usually able to get the best out of your services.

Systemized knowledge can also be used to proactively instruct users, suppliers, customers on system functionality and how best to interact with the system, common questions can be addressed ahead of them being asked. The effective use of this system helps increase customer satisfaction, making them more likely to be a repeat customer, all while taking the load off your customer service team!

Getting started on systemized knowledge

To build a successful system, you’ll need to understand how your business works. This means understanding your customers’ needs and desires. It also means understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. The more you know about your business, the easier it will be to create a system that suits you.

QSTRAT Sales allows users real time visibility of the entire quotation process. QSTRAT Sales is a secure browser-based quotation process management application that offers flexibility and scalability to handle all of your organization’s quotation needs. QSTRAT Sales has built in reporting features that can be configured to communicate with a variety of popular databases. QSTRAT Sales is extremely easy to use. Users can create a new RFQ, attach documents and drawing files, add notes, then route and track the status of the RFQs with our revolutionary QuoteFlow™ technology. QSTRAT Sales gives you the latest information instantly, allowing you to improve both your RFQ turnaround time and win more profitable business.

To learn more about QSTRAT Sales, the full QSTRAT suite, or to book a demo, get in touch!