We all want everything at our companies to work perfectly, for all processes to be as automated as possible and for everything to function like clockwork.
If you picture a company like a big iceberg, all the infrastructures (warehouses, offices, etc) and material assets (stock) would be the visible part, what the world sees, our letter of introduction to the exterior. In this part there is always more money available to invest, it always seems like too little and we tend to think: the more, the better.
But then we have the ice under the water, the part that goes unseen but is what really makes our company work better or worse. Currently, this internal part depends totally on various tasks which are automated in our computer systems.
Although many companies have begun to use Big Data tools to analyse different processes and invest in improving their computer systems, we sincerely believe there is still a long way to go.
To improve their level of customer service, manufacturers and wholesalers alike make major investments in big warehouses with thousands of reference number available, but sometimes I wonder:
What is the point of having large-capacity warehouses if we fail to optimise the selection of products inside?
What’s the point of offering a lot of products if we don’t analyse whether our customers can find them easily or not?
Let’s wake up to the fact that investing in information technologies will make our companies much more profitable. Investing in the invisible part of the iceberg of our companies, although it’s hard to believe, could give us a 10-times-greater return on our investment than what we get for investing in the visible and tangible part.
