How Data Exchange Products can Help Your Company Grow: Benefit 4 - By Optimizing Processes

Hello, my name is Aneta Dyńka, I’m a Business Solution Manager at Comarch Consulting. Today I will explain to you how data exchange solutions can help you optimize processes in your company.

Every single task and extensive process can be analyzed and optimized. However, to do this effectively requires thorough preparation, and will often engage many stakeholders from various businesses.

So, what can you do to optimize processes successfully?

1. First – identify key processes, map each single step and assign responsibilities
2. Next, at each step define problems and issues that may impede a given process. Don’t forget to anticipate the potential impact on other processes in the organization
3. Then, define improvement goals and measurable results for the improvements you want to achieve
4. Finally - choose the optimal solution, test it and then implement it

Why these steps are important?

If you assign responsibilities carefully, it will be easy to identify and engage all stakeholders that might be interested in certain improvements.

It often happens that improvement initiated by one business creates further needs among other participants in the supply chain. Let me give you an example of an EDI project. The financial department wants to get rid of paper documents, and implements electronic invoices. The savings are so evident, that the project is expanded with other types of electronic documents, such as order acceptance (important for sales) or automatically generated delivery orders (useful for logistics). The wide flow of documents is digitized and automated, not only with business partners, but also internally.

You may ask why it is necessary to spend time analyzing the mutual implications of individual processes. Because it may occur that many processes are disrupted by the same problem, for example by an inefficient product catalog. This can be fixed and optimized by implementing one common solution, such as a master data management tool. Or perhaps the demand planning process, and consequently production and logistics, could be optimized thanks to daily and automatic sell-out and inventory reports from distributors. In this case, an online distribution platform would be useful for all mentioned business areas. Another example: maybe you are using Excel files to plan your marketing activities and have issues with tracking all data? The process would be more effective if you used AI algorithms helping you to predict which products are worth promoting and when. You could then share those predictions with the sales team, with production and logistics. And again – one tool, which is a trade promotion management application, will be beneficial for various stakeholders.

As you can see, the scope for process improvement and potential benefits seems to be unlimited. Many data exchange products can be implemented as cross-business solutions, which makes optimization more complex and effective in the long term.

So, what are your needs and which solution will work for you? To address those questions, consider using the experience of software providers to help you identify potential issues and choose the right solution.

If you would like to know how Comarch can support you with modern data exchange tools, please contact me at aneta.dynka@comarch.com