Introduction
The goal of every business is to create more products, provide better service, and do more sales. When this additional demand is handled with no additional costs we can say the business is scaling. Scalability depends on the efficiency of operations, underlying processes, and systems. This blog is written with business and engineering leaders in mind, who seek to optimize their business processes and scale their business using the Salesforce platform.
Growing Challenges
As a business expands it faces challenges of increasing demand and traffic. High levels of demand can lead to capacity limitations which is often a good problem to have. On the other hand, struggling to handle demand at moderate levels indicates inefficiencies in applications and processes. These Inefficiencies do have an impact on business.
Opportunity Impact
Inefficiency can have an impact on revenue. For instance, we were called to work on a Digital Community site that was having low adoption by partners and customers in certain countries, the reason, the site was slow and frustrating to use.
There was a new division project by a large bank that was delayed because data migrations into Salesforce were extremely slow and data was unavailable for their account teams.
Cost Impact
End-user complaints about inefficient applications and pages are very common. Unlike functional problems, efficiency problems can be difficult to identify and fix. This requires the cost of hiring resources to fix the problems and the time taken for the project.
Productivity Impact
Inefficiencies anywhere in the system have a significant impact on customer and employee experience because users are at the receiving end of application processing. Lack of good experience leads to user complaints and low adoption of the business process and productivity goes down.
Steps to efficiency at lower cost
As we see inefficiency has a cost, however, based on our experience working with scale and efficiency proactively thinking about efficiency costs can be kept low and experience and productivity can go up. Simple steps to avoid the challenges we discussed above:
Prioritizing efficiency
Do we wonder what is the experience our users have from an application or business process? Typically, features are a higher priority compared to efficiency. However, making sure a business process or application is efficient ensures they remain performant and cost-effective for a long time.
Demand Efficiency
Performance, experience, and ease of maintenance should be part of the delivery of any project or applications from vendors, project leaders, development teams, engineering teams, and ourselves. This can be in the form of measurements, testing, and other means.
Consistent efficiency
Changes such as new features are a common factor in inefficiency creeping into applications, systems, or processes. Having quick validation of the impact of changes will keep the system efficient and cost-effective for a long time. In the upcoming posts on this topic, we will discuss indicators for efficiency in applications, processes, and data and how they can be measured and addressed, and the available tools.
Is it worth the effort?
Having a high level of efficiency in our business and processes and systems does have the benefit of better employee and customer experience as well cost reductions. We get also get stability and confidence in our applications and processes, and more can be done without running into a ton of problems. That is business scale!
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