The latest figures from the Construction Products Association indicate that the construction industry is in for a lean time over the next couple of years. Clearly there will still be new build and refurbishment projects awarded, but competition will be fierce and prices are likely to be keen.
Under such conditions it makes sense to look for a competitive edge, and streamlining key processes is an obvious way forward. Anything that wastes time and resources wastes money.
Whether it is staff time, energy or consumables waste poses a direct risk to competitiveness and profitability. The good news is that there are ways to reduce waste, improve sustainability and give the bottom line a bit more room to breathe.
It might not seem the most exciting place to start, but the management of transactions within the supply chain is proving a profitable route to savings in all three of these areas.
The old ways of printing out documents and posting or faxing them is an area of waste that does no favours for a modern company operating in today’s construction market. And even if you have evolved to creating PDFs and emailing them, you may be saving on paper and postage but these still require manual processing. Consequently the most expensive resource – time – is still being wasted!
The obvious alternative is to adopt eTrading, where this waste is eliminated by exchanging electronic documents directly between your back office system and those of your customers and suppliers. The whole process can be automated, so that your people have time to get on with the tasks that genuinely require human input. Electronic trading also makes it much easier to manage costs throughout the supply chain.
Of course, you may be appalled at the thought of investing in new IT systems when there are lean times ahead. But the typical investment is relatively small, the return on investment is fast and the ongoing savings are potentially enormous!
That’s why users of Causeway Tradex report major financial benefits within a very short time of implementing the Tradex eTrading solution.
