Sofiane Ainine, General Manager Enterprise for Mid-Market, ANZ, SAP shares with us his Small Business savings tips that owners should follow.
Small businesses have had a challenging number of years with regular business interruptions and market volatility impacting workforces and supply chain operations. With so much economic uncertainty ahead and ongoing inflation, its important small businesses take the time to review their position.
Here are three Small Business savings tips to plan for disruption and position your business for success.
Maximise supply transparency to minimise cost
According to data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the most common supply chain issue for 88 percent of businesses was domestic and international delivery delays, while 75 percent faced increased supply processes, including rising transport costs.
While delivery delays and increased costs are undoubtedly challenging for small businesses, it has highlighted the need for traditional supply chains to be diversified.
Business networks can be used by organisations to access a range of trading partners, such as suppliers, carriers, and service providers both locally and in other markets. This means that when faced with supply challenges, they can stay agile and switch suppliers as needed to ensure consistency across the supply chain.
This is currently a difficult lesson that many businesses are learning from and is sparking a movement towards reshoring, onshoring and nearshoring, and the relocation of manufacturing sites closer to consumption. For instance, the US government recently signed new legislation that includes a $52 billion investment in grants and incentives for manufacturing semiconductors in-country, in an effort to encourage companies to unwind dependence on foreign semiconductor manufacturers.
Invest in external management to drive long term savings
Ongoing labour challenges may be unavoidable, but companies can help themselves by applying greater due diligence to their workforce planning, including examining the role of external labour.
A report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by SAP, revealed that 96 percent of respondents have made or are making alterations to workplaces because of recent business disruptions, while 92 percent said organisations need to adopt new workplace strategies to remain competitive.
With companies relying on external labour to fill gaps, streamlining how these workers are managed not only helps small business owners drive administration costs down, but it also means workforce operations can be rapidly scaled up or down as market conditions change. In some industries, especially highly regulated ones, outsourcing certain tasks to a third-party service provider enables organisations to pass risks on to an entity better equipped to handle them.
External employees can also enable small businesses to manage their workforce by giving them access to sought-after skills and knowledge without the additional complexities and costs by bringing staff on full-time.
Determine where automation can be implemented
Since the federal government adopted e-invoicing in July, it is now a non-negotiable for businesses to rely on manual financial processes, such as email or PDF invoicing. A Deloitte study estimates that e-invoicing can save Australia’s SMBs up to $40,320 annually.
Manual spend management can cost businesses valuable time and money; eliminating these repetitive processes through automation frees employees and owners to focus on high-value tasks that generate revenue and drive innovation.
Ultimately, greater visibility across the supply chain equips businesses with the insights to overcome market disruption and improve the efficiency of their procurement operations. The increased use of technologies such as predictive or advanced analytics, video and audio communications platforms and automation into largely paper-based processes will also push small businesses to make better-informed decisions as they leverage data to gain critical business insights.
Digital technologies have also helped companies introduce more flexible remote working options and enable faster collaboration with suppliers. With hybrid and remote working here to stay, optimising external workforce management and business operations mean companies can reduce full-time staff management overhead, improve operations safety, and quickly scale up or down to stay ahead of competitors.
Business growth and security this financial year will require an investment in the digitalisation of operations. By embracing technology to streamline processes, small businesses can improve their resilience and deliver the value required to stay competitive.
More Small Business savings tips can be found by topic on our website