------------------ ARTICLE START ------------------ Early-Warning-Systems for small businesses

Most of you would say, that this might not be most important problem small businesses have to solve during their business operation. Well, that might be true, but on other hand, if your business has an early-warning-system, than it could assist you in operating your business and keeps you focused on solving bottlenecks you are actually facing.

But first of all, in case of Early-Warning-Systems it is necessary to define what a small business is. A small business is usually a business operated by 1 or a few people, but could also be a company with as much as 500 employees. This article concentrates on small businesses with 1 to 50 employees. As this is definition of small business, than we have to define what an Early-Warning-System should look like.

While running a small business, people involved usually have not time dealing with Early-Warning-Systems a lot. Because of lack of time, there has to be a lean solution, which takes care of following things:

* easy to use solution * not time consuming * showing recommendations for possible actions on early warnings * giving priorities which bottlenecks have to be solved first * having a short reporting cycle * a reasonable price, every small business could afford.

Lets go to list one by one:

Easy to use solution

What does that mean? On my opinion, easy usage is, when something is easy and fast to understand. Something I do not need to read a huge book with hundreds of pages or where I have to attend a training, which keeps you occupied by several hours or days, just to know basic features.

Having a system with huge databases and many features and reporting alternatives, is not only time consuming, it is also annoying, because you ever feel you need to perform a lot more reports. And you always feel that you may missed something.

Furthermore a good Early-Warning-System solution should work with only few input. But that's another point.

Not time consuming

When you have to input a lot of data that is one possible time consuming task. On other hand, you do not know, if a huge database will make your Early-Warning-System better. So it is better to focus on a few important data, than having a huge database, which you probably never use.

When concentrating on important data, you are not able to use every data from your business operation directly. Some data have to be calculated to business ratios, which are a better basis for analysis. But this brings to mind to select right business ratios. There are so many to find.

Well, there are a few which could be used for all kinds of businesses, such as

* Customer Contacts * Complaints * Orders in Process * Customer Loyalty * Usage of capacity * Order Processing Time

to show just a few. Would be an analysis, which uses only 30 business ratios or business numbers a time consuming solution? I guess you say no. But, what would be if you have to fill in these numbers every day? Well, that's not necessary. One time a week should be enough.

However, even if 30 or 60 values for business ratios per week does not sound much work, but there is a little more work to do upfront, before you could use these values for analysis. You have to find values in your company, you have to calculate business ratio values and so on. This I believe sounds to be a lot more work as you thought.

When you install right procedure to get necessary data for analysis, you may have only a bigger one-time work. It's all in procedure you choose. Make it as easy as possible and it won't be a time consuming task.

Recommend actions/measures

Early-Warnings are signs, which a system should generate, when a point is reached, where you said it should inform you that a situation is going to be worse. There are many systems out there providing early-warnings, but question is always, on which basis this warning has been calculated and to what will it lead you.

Preconditions