Top four time wasters
At Podfather, we commonly find ourselves working closely with lots of different businesses, large and small, from lots of different industry sectors. It doesn’t matter which sector it is – distribution, construction, or field services to name a few – we find common problems that drain time and money that can often be solved through a digital transformation project that streamlines data through a business to the people that need it most.
Here’s a list of our top 4:
Poor communication
Many things happen in a business environment when communication is lacking; including distrust among employees, uncertainty and confusion, ineffective customer service and hours of lost productivity. Most of us can probably relate to the frustration of receiving conflicting messages from different managers or waiting for a response or sign-off before you can complete your task and move on to the next one. These things inevitably lead to inefficiency, thus losing a company both time and money.
This, in turn, affects your business’s customer service since employees can’t answer questions, they don’t have the answer to and need to leave the customer waiting while they attempt to get the information. Such a process can take longer than the customer wishes to wait, and next thing you might see a bad review of your company in an online forum.
With a sound logistics system like PODFather you can easily input info that can be seen instantly, so you don’t need to wait around for answers. You can replace the old paper trail with a back-office software that will show everyone the same information at all times, and any changes will show up immediately eliminating the problem of mixed messages. It takes care of a lot of the communication for you.
Poor planning
This can affect your business in many areas (and so can poor communication, of course). For instance, if it’s not clear what the essential tasks for the day are, and what tasks have priority, then employees may struggle to do their job efficiently.
Other things like poor planning of schedules and routes can be a cause for irritation from both drivers and office employees. If a driver has a list of jobs to complete, and the route hasn’t been planned adequately, they may find themselves crisscrossing paths to complete jobs on time. They may take a wrong turn and must drive back, or get stuck in sudden traffic, making them late and leaving the customer waiting, or perhaps even missing their delivery. This will likely result in customer annoyance, and that can harm your business.
That can be where PODFather comes in. Our powerful routing algorithms allocate thousands of jobs to the appropriate drivers and optimise hundreds of runs in just a couple of minutes. This handy function is the one of the reasons for many of our customers’ success in their business.
Lack of skills or knowledge
The above mentioned certainly do not help in a situation where an employee is unsure of how to perform their daily tasks. Maybe they have recently joined the company or perhaps changed department or position and have several unfamiliar tasks and procedures at hand and no assistance available when they need it.
As a result, they have to either wait for someone to become available to assist them or they need to figure it out for themselves, which can work if they’re lucky. However, having employees attempting to perform unfamiliar tasks without proper guidance can at best be a case of “you did it wrong, now do it again” or at worst it can cause significant consequences for your business.
In these situations, you need a system that is very manageable and so easy to learn that even the least tech-savvy individual can master it quickly. This will save your employees and yourself from complicated systems that take ages to understand fully.
PODFather combines an intuitive user interface with customisable workflows which help guide the user to complete tasks correctly.
Lack of resources
Needing to spend a long time waiting for guidance is often a result of a lack of resources, mainly referring to employees, equipment, and funds. Sometimes you need more employees than you have to complete a particular task, but you don’t have enough time and money to train and pay new employees, so you have to make do with the team you have. This can lead to late hours and tough work and projects likely running late despite the time and effort you’ve dedicated to the project. Very frustrating, indeed, and seemingly a hopeless situation.
You can solve this by implementing software that completes the same process it would take your employees several hours to do, in just minutes. If you have a fast and efficient system for an affordable price, you can use the money you would otherwise spend on salaries to help grow your business.
If you think we might be able to help your business, give us a call on 0131 553 0400.
