To manage your MSP business operations efficiently, you need a long-range view. Only when you can see all the moving pieces can you avoid being blindsided somewhere down the road. Unfortunately, most traditional ERP systems only reveal a small slice of what’s really going on, leading many managers to wonder where exactly things went wrong when the bottom line takes a turn.
An Executive Insights dashboard not only gives you better data analytics, it breaks down that information so you can see the connections between your employees, clients, and larger metrics. If you don’t want your success to be based on guesswork, at Nexera we help you manage what you can’t always see in your other business management software and traditional ERPs.
A 30,000-Foot View
What does it really mean to see into the distance? For most owners, it’s pure relief. You don’t have to worry about what’s lurking in the shadows or whether your good decisions were based on luck. Plus, you can prepare for the future in a way you never could before. If you’ve gotten used to either ignoring your ERP reports, a stockpile of email alerts or internally arguing against their findings, it’s likely because you’re only getting a short-term view.
NEXERA has built an analytics dashboard that shows you what’s happening every month so you can compare your performance against previous months and the industry overall. This gives you a chance to spot trends, problems, and opportunities as they pop up. Here, we’ll break down the KPIs the Executive Dashboard covers and how NEXERA digs deeper to scrape up every last bit of meaningful data.
Track Service Calls
With NEXERA, you can see:
- Callbacks: Track how many service calls need a technician to fix, and compare your numbers against target goals. Courtesy calls are filtered, so you’re getting the real metrics.
- Costs: If you’re spending too much on callbacks, you can see where you’re falling behind and how to address it with service leadership. On the flip side, you can also see where you’ll save if you make specific improvements.
- Comparisons: See where you fall against other dealerships and whether your numbers are a function of your client base or inefficiencies. Give your team a heads up about what’s going right and where they can make some adjustments.
- Delays: If your calls are delayed due to parts availability, you can see how often this issue occurs and how it’s impacting your overall business. You may need to either adjust your car stock levels or review suppliers.
- Percentages: Ideally, your employees should be spending about 85% of their time on service calls, giving them 15% for necessary training, administrative duties, etc. With the Executive Insights dashboard, you can quantify the reality, which can help you identify areas to improve technician productivity.
- Territories: See how efficiently your technicians are assigned to different territories, so you can evaluate your balance. This way, you can calibrate your labor against the number of assigned machinery in different territories.
Track Machinery
The Executive Insights dashboard shows you:
- Population: See your full equipment list broken down by product class. Compare your monthly numbers against each other to identify any drastic changes in machine count.
- Serial number data: Effortlessly track machinery with exportable serial number data. This feature drastically reduces the odds of errors — especially if your clients purchase equipment in bulk.
Track Parts-Inventory Management
Track your total inventory across time:
- Overstocks: NEXERA flags any inventory exceeding three months of average monthly use. Our business insights also reveal how much the overstocks cost you.
- Obsolescence: Monitor your inventory as it transfers from functional to obsolete. Track equipment/parts costs as they move from 12 – 18 months of use to 18+ months of use. See the breakdown of inventory against usage timeframes.
- Trends: Use the trending data to monitor write-offs and reduction efforts. Justify parts-inventory management decisions with the numbers to back them up.
How Better Analytics Reveal Performance Gaps
Today’s data-soaked world has given us endless reports and analytics. Unfortunately, those analytics don’t always correlate to real-world change. Even more unfortunately, it’s not hard to find some reports that are too reactionary or downright inaccurate at worse.
With NEXERA, you don’t necessarily get more numbers, you get a better cross-section of data that reveals the everyday decisions that ultimately translate to success or failure. You can see how you’re outperforming your channel peers, which can help your marketing and sales teams craft their messaging to different types of clients. You can also see where you’re falling behind, so you’re less likely to lose business.
Whether you’re the number one dealer in your area or you’re trailing, better analytics can help you translate every metric into its larger financial impact. For example, if your employees are spending 25% of their time on courtesy calls, you can see what that’s costing you and start focusing on steps to improve their service call percentage.
A Better Culture
Even the best ERP systems can’t address the culture of a company. If your dealership has poor morale, disorganized hierarchies, and misaligned incentives, you’ll eventually start to see the cracks. You likely already have at least a partial understanding of some of your organization’s issues, but if you’re stuck piecing together the fragments across departments, you can easily draw the wrong conclusions about what’s driving those issues.
When you implement data-driven decision-making from the top-down, you give everyone the chance to benefit — even if you’re not actively interacting with every employee. In addition, you instill a culture that doesn’t rely solely on instincts and gut reactions. After you pore over your reports, you might see that the problem is not that your employees don’t have enough time to deal with their workload, it’s that they don’t have the expertise to handle the types of service calls you’re getting. Or that your obsolete equipment has started to cost far more than it’s worth to keep in action.
Simple Steps to Improve Your Performance
If you’re like most dealerships, the emphasis on cost control has likely never been higher than it is today. In the age of automation, the pressure to efficiently allocate every dollar has become a rallying cry for most leaders. In spite of this, many dealerships continue to lose money and morale because they’re zooming in on all the wrong organizational aspects.
No matter what type of market you’re working in, there are always steps that you can take to manage your operations. Implementing NEXERA’s Executive Insights dashboard can be a simple way to streamline your data analytics. Not only can you quickly access your data, you can see how everything from call times to product classes impact your final budget.
At NEXERA, we offer our clients targeted support that gives them real agency across multiple departments. Rather than simply measuring the number of calls your employees took, you get a much more detailed description of what those calls entailed and whether they were worth taking. If you’re looking for a smarter way to upgrade your ERP reports, NEXERA can streamline your collection and give you insight into how it compares against both your competition and your own internal goals.
