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Growth is Excellent Until your Business Can’t Keep Up

Growth is what every business aims for, but it comes with its very own challenges. Your growing success could be short-lived if your company does not prepare for the volume of work that new business brings.

That is precisely where our latest client Cambridge Performance Composites (CPC) found themselves. Having undergone a period of rapid growth, CPC was left pushing their current spreadsheet system to its limits.

Eager to continue the success of their expanding business, CPC has chosen not to let their systems hold back their potential for growth. Instead, they opted to implement ProgresssPlus.

With Growth Comes Change

A rapid expansion in business comes hand in hand with an increased volume of work. This high volume of work calls out for an effective system that can cope with the growing demand of customers.

Explained by Lance Mayers, Production & Engineering Manager at CPC, “We have been actively growing the business, investing in the company and expanding our capabilities. Our current system was struggling with the higher volume of data going into excel spreadsheets which meant the business was not coping as well as it should”.

Systems that once suited your business may no longer be up for the challenge, and it may be time to step out of your comfort zone towards future business development.

Cautious in Change

While most businesses recognise the need for a change in their systems, they are cautious about taking the steps. Either set in their ways, protective or scalded by previous experiences, there are a variety of reasons why some businesses dig their heels.

CPC’s current spreadsheet system had been able to carry the business through previous projects, but as the work mounted, the cracks were beginning to show.

Time

Effective time management is the holy grail of any growing business. With all members of the team already kept busy with their job roles, taking time out of their day to manage data is a demand many companies cannot afford.

Lance explained CPC’s time frustration, “The sheer volume of orders, the quoting and data input… what we are looking at is a full-time job.”

The key to a sound system is how well it ticks along behind the scenes, without anyone even noticing. If any business system is taking up more time than it saves, it is time for a change. By freeing up time spent on processing data, your team can re-shift their focus to the job at hand. It is improving time management while ultimately expanding business capabilities.

Efficiency

There is nothing more frustrating than spending hours or days working on a project, manually entering lines and lines of data, for it all to disappear at the click of a button. This unpredictable nature is, unfortunately, part and parcel with a spreadsheet process. Despite moving to a cloud format to allow multiple members of the team to edit at once, this system still comes with its risks.

As discovered by Lance, “Spreadsheets are a bit precarious if we are working on the same part, as data can get overwritten. We have sat there all morning inputting data, it gets overwritten, and then we have lost everything, this has happened on a handful of occasions.”

With ProgressPlus not only is the fear of losing data taken out of the equation, with the ability to follow each section of production from inception to shipping and beyond digitally, but the efficiency of entering data is also more streamlined.

People Management

One of the key influencers in change within any business is undoubtedly the people who it will affect. If any team members drag their heels in the process of change, the outcome of the journey will be affected.

That was the case for CPC, as Lance explained. We have several people that will engage with this who don’t know the system, so there has been a degree of preparation. When I engaged in an initial conversation with our production scheduler, he wasn’t keen on change and protective of his spreadsheets.”

This fear of rocking the boat prevents business from making some much-needed changes. While this cautious mentality may seem to avoid disaster, it could be the cause. 

Talk the Change Through

Ultimately, all a team member wants to know is that the change taking place is going to make their life easier, not harder. By walking the path together, CPC and ProgressPlus were able to put any uncertain minds at ease.

Lance explained that (once wary team member) Vince is now pro-change, “by his admission he is struggling to keep up and agrees we need to evolve. And now Vince is very enthusiastic.”

Streamlining processes, in turn, increases business capabilities and ultimately leads to potential growth.

Help your business keep up and keep ahead, request a ProgressPlus demo today.