Is your business growth causing operational havoc and missed opportunities? If your business is not reaching the fullest potential, you might want to consider updating or implementing an operating system before becoming overgrown or overwhelmed.
If you want to be a thriving business, you must be agile to change. Whether you set goals to enter a new market, modify products or services, acquire another business, or scale up operations to turn more profit, you will be faced with modifying challenges. To successfully grow, your business should have the agility to dynamically change with the support of a business operating system. Those with outdated operating systems and models that cannot adapt will fall behind.
A business operating system (BOS) is the essential building block to running a business and the key to synchronizing processes, methods, and mechanisms. A businesses operating system is like a heart, holding the responsibility of giving life to the business. Working hard to run your business, the operating system (OS) distributes data and integrated business processes throughout the organization, similar to how the heart pumps blood and oxygen. Your operating system, like a computer OS, is the constituent piece that connects all the organization’s intricate parts and steps together to achieve the business’s strategy.
A foundational BOS encompasses a business’ strategy and processes through an agile information technology (IT) system. If you want to be a growing business and seize change, a well-designed and intentional BOS will enable agility and increase performance. Implementing or updating your business operating system will change how you do business by better connecting your internal people with your business strategy and uniting how your company operates, markets, and appears to customers.
A Well-Designed BOS
Updating a new BOS is driven by necessary changes that are both technical and cultural. The BOS infrastructure should codify and automate the operating process steps and roles through each department or internal system. Data and process integration in one centralized BOS will create trackable, replicable, and scalable system processes.
The first step is understanding the strategic direction of your company and implementing the right teams and tools to execute goals in one centralized system. Your BOS design should establish systems, processes, rhythms, and templates your organization uses to run day-to-day operations. Then, a well-designed business operations environment will streamline workloads and operation processes by utilizing an IT system that interconnects automation and manual work. Along with well-designed and tested operation strategies and processes, an agile business operating system encompasses business data intelligence and digital technologies.
IT system
A flexible and well-designed IT system will support change. If there is a problem or a shift in business operations, an inflexible IT infrastructure will react to these events slowly and cause the business to respond slowly and result in stalled business decisions. Flexibility in a BOS should be present in its software structure, application systems, and people managing it. Implementing an OS may encompass hardware purchases and software upgrades.
A major component and one of the many benefits of a digital business operating system is creating and utilizing the necessary tools to measure processes as well as overall health. Your centralized BOS should pull in constant new data and build informative reports to monitor the performance of all various objectives across all internal systems and applications.
Benefits of Implementing a Business System
Increased customers’ satisfaction
Following a strategic business operating system with the right software tools will correlate to improved customer relationship management (CRM). Your CRM application tool within your business operating system should source constant information on customer touchpoints, customer demands, and areas of improvement. Since business revenues rely on customer experience, implementing a central system with the ability to analyze, track, and measure customer desires and demands is critical. Identify customer insights through qualitative and quantitative research to help further understand, retain, and increase your customer base. Additionally, your digital BOS should include how your customers connect with you. Implementing a simple and intuitive customer interface with a single-click or smooth functions for customer inquiries such as purchasing, acquiring more information, or connecting with a customer representative. Lastly, CRM tracking and engagement should be centralized and interconnected to multiple department systems: sales and lead generation, marketing with customer reach metrics, and customer service processes that are both automated and manually supported. The right BOS will help you monitor customer expectations and determine how to accurately improve customer satisfaction.
Improved employee engagement
Centralization will lead to an increase in productivity for both those who are assigned the work for execution and management. Consistent processes with clear protocols will enable proper knowledge for staff members to complete their work accurately and consistently. Systematic operations will better align the staff with the strategy increasing their accountability and vision engagement. Additionally, having a system in place will allow new employees to quickly integrate into the culture and help see their role within the firm and bring forth new ideas.
Scalable structure
A robust business operating system should implement scalable operations for smooth growth. When processes are well defined and developed in the IT system along with automated task deployment, prioritization, and resources, processes will manage heightened operations. Before doubling in staff or running a market expansion, your BOS must be well established with scalable systematic processes throughout the digital infrastructure. The foundational business model, operational strategy, and core objectives should be developed to scale saving you from the growing pains small businesses face with manual operating systems.
If your business increases without an organized, codified, integrated BOS, your business may become disorganized, lack employee accountability, strain your operation efficiencies, and feel chaotic. Implementing a replicable and expandable business operating system will create a sustainable business ecosystem for your business to evolve in.
Reduced costs and increased profitability
Are the time and money spent on restructuring a business operating system worth it? If you want to grow and increase profits, it is the means necessary. A successfully implemented business operating will change your business and reduce overall costs and increase profitability. However, it is difficult to quantify the value of business operating systems and IT software in general. The inability to account for your BOS profitability might keep it from your profit-and-loss statement and cause a floating budget.
According to GB Tech, SMB’s spend between 3% and 6% of revenue on IT budgets, but not every business sector will need to invest huge cash sums into their BOS infrastructure. Calculating the right budget for your IT infrastructure will depend on the value of the system to you. If you can estimate your dollar value, that is where you should base a license agreement at.
As your operating system helps you concentrate on customer expectations, analyze touchpoint experiences, and further strengthen customer retention and increase customer base, you will cut customer acquisition costs and increase revenue. A robust business system can increase performance and allow for increased operations with fewer mistakes creating efficient profitability without compromising the nature of the business. The ROI of a well-designed operating system that will enable higher productivity and growth is often well worth the upfront expenses. Part of your working operation expenses should be your system in which they are managed, so utilizing a working capital loan to make the update to a dependable BOS might be the right financial solution for your company.
Tips on Implementation
Design and test processes
How does your company develop and document your internal operating processes? Before concluding that a new business operating system may solve your problems, ensure you have well-developed and tested concise work flowcharts and modeled processes. Effective processes are clear, replicable, documents, supported by tools, and accessible to internal people. These should include decision-making processes, conflict resolution processes, and how a business communicates within itself, to third party players, and its customers. Processes should be outlined and tested before being deployed into a BOS. Jumping into a new IT system too soon may result in automating inefficiencies.
Connect operation systems to structure
A business operating system should encompass and tie together all internal operating pieces: strategy, technology, processes, systems, and people. These internal systems might include accounting, financials, marketing, sales, operation cycles, and/or all departments or activities that your business operates on. Defining your business processes and internal systems first will result in an organizational structure that supports the way you do business rather than constraining it. A well-designed BOS is structured on well-developed business strategies that are documented, tested, and deployed and are supported through technical applications and processes.
As you rethink your operation strategy and each subsystem of operations as one whole complex yet streamlined unit or body, you will gain a more systematic process for strategy creation and implementation and align your organization’s future vision.
Invest in digital talent
If you are not an IT organization and will likely purchase an IT system for your business operations that you did not write yourselves, implementing and updating your BOS can be challenging. Therefore, to improve a system and utilize its computing capabilities, it may be beneficial to invest in digital talent within your internal team. Deploying a new system, writing automation, computing business metrics, and patching operation changes within applications can be a workload to manage, and may only be efficiently achieved by a team of IT professionals.
Whether you have a complete IT team or not, investing in enterprise software for business operations is a necessary tool for business management and organization. There are many user-friendly CRM tools, management programs, and low-code platforms for you to culminate your BOS into. As you grow, you will likely add and utilize several enterprise applications. If you are not designing them yourself, ensure to conduct research and run demos to find what works best for your needs and will further support your systematic operations. Also, consider how multiple software solutions might integrate and how API’s (Application Programming Interface) can integrate your data collected from each application into your BOS. Systemizing your internal operations will help you pinpoint your focus, replicate processes, manage employees, and increase productivity, and help you further your business strategic planning, growth, and creation.