The first step in digital transformation of business: Eliminate spreadsheets.

Inconspicuous spreadsheets are like transparent tape, an essential for all businesses. Spreadsheets link sales and HR processes, record countless email lists, and track inventory and asset items.

However, as businesses grow to a certain size, the utility of this tape diminishes. Either many staff need to update the same spreadsheet, or data must be 100% accurate in real-time to ensure other departments operate efficiently. If spreadsheets are used, businesses often encounter various issues.

A viable solution is to integrate spreadsheets and various applications into a connected platform, as most successful businesses do. This can automatically reduce the workload of copying and pasting from applications and paper forms into spreadsheets. This article will analyze the impact of spreadsheets on business operations and explore how a unified system can improve operations.

Abandon paper timesheets By eliminating the delay between time recording and time entry, businesses can immediately optimize cash flow. After all, some businesses need secretaries to enter time, waiting a month before invoicing clients. Online timesheets also support instant updates to every employee's work schedule. Businesses can see what stage employees are at in a project and when they will finish and become available. For businesses, the more time employees are available to work, the more billable hours, and the higher the profit.

Inventory Improving inventory management can immediately improve cash flow. This means businesses can reduce the funds tied up in raw materials in factories and workshops, improve supply chain efficiency, and reduce obsolete/discounted inventory. In manufacturing, more effective inventory management helps to see the waste associated with each product. Once businesses can accurately measure waste, they can try various methods to reduce it, thereby immediately increasing profit.

Connect business departments Operating a business on a unified platform allows managers to easily see the operations of each department and more easily set business and departmental goals. For example, using a business management system, businesses can easily track leads, opportunities, orders, invoices, and cash receipts, tracking the entire process from first contact with potential customers to order delivery. In addition, businesses can improve overall operational efficiency. Business management systems can turn sales orders into work orders, automatically creating bills of materials and deducting related materials from inventory during the conversion process. Finally, businesses can significantly improve customer experience. Everyone can see the latest order status and when they will receive the order, enabling better customer service.

Governance A sign of business maturity is the establishment of a board of directors and a focus on governance. The board is responsible for setting budgets and development goals and tracking them throughout the year. This requires businesses to strengthen process work to ensure that processes run consistently across the enterprise. Using real-time reports, businesses can more easily see if processes are running as expected and if the organization is moving towards its goals. Reporting to managers can also trigger cultural changes. Employee meetings will discuss the best measures to solve problems, rather than just being satisfied with solving problems.

Scalability Business management systems can run numerous key processes, helping businesses more easily expand their footprint. One advantage of using a unified platform is that businesses can design and build workflows across multiple key departments (such as sales, marketing, and finance). With the right workflow rules, actions in one department will automatically trigger predefined measures in another department. This will improve back-office efficiency and help businesses easily cope with the growing demands of front-office staff. Another advantage is that new employees only need to learn how to use one interface to access all business systems. The fewer the interfaces, the lower the training needs, and the faster new employees can get to work. As a result, new offices will be able to achieve a faster return on investment.

Today, the operation of manufacturing businesses cannot be separated from a business platform that supports multiple accounting methods and cost and inventory tracking. The more closely businesses can track information in real-time, the faster they can make wise investment decisions. In contrast, whether using old-style ERP or a mix of applications and spreadsheets, businesses struggle to switch from average cost method to standard cost method. Without auxiliary spreadsheets, some businesses can't even calculate costs. Spreadsheets are certainly a very effective tool, but in reporting work, the more spreadsheets there are, the slower the decision-making speed. Business decisions rely on data, and if businesses have to depend on a manager to update data, they can only start decision-making after the update is complete. This approach also means a higher risk of errors. Whether it's typing errors or entering data into the wrong field, it can lead to incorrect final results.

In this regard, the Oracle NetSuite ERP system based on cloud technology can replace the many spreadsheets used by manufacturing businesses. Instead of using multiple systems, businesses only need one customer record system to track the entire process from leads to sales to work orders and delivery. When the business development team pulls customer records, the records will show all the customer's historical purchases, delivery times, and customer support service information. Moreover, businesses only need one product record system to see existing inventory levels and understand raw material, part, and component information.