Are Your Spreadsheets Ready for the Digital Economy?

Every small-business owner should be proud of what they have each achieved through hard work, big ideas, careful expense management, an unsinkable will, and lots of elbow grease. So it’s perfectly understandable for business owners to believe that all those terrific attributes that got them here can also take them there to the next level of growth and success.

But on their own, they simply can’t. It’s not that those approaches have diminished in value. Quite the contrary—they’re more valuable than ever before.

But in today’s data-driven and increasingly digital economy, they’re no longer enough. And while fax machines, spreadsheets, memos, emails, and back-of-envelope projections were plenty good enough to get you this far, they’re simply not up to the task in 2021 and beyond. Here are some reasons why:

• The pandemic that continues to rock our world has forced every business in every industry to rethink supply chains from two perspectives: as a supplier and as a customer. As so much has changed up and down those supply chains, is it reasonable to think that the tools of the last decade—heck, the last century—will be sufficient for your next 3 years?
• The changing face of customer engagements means every business needs to be as omnichannel as possible.
• The relentless need for speed in business operations. If your competitors are using modern cloud applications to manage inventory, orchestrate supply chains, and shorten billing cycles, how will you keep up?
• The customer demand for more precision on delivery times and on multi-location shipments, while at the same time requiring you to send digital invoices. Can your venerable but outdated equipment meet that new demand?
• The push among consumers for escalating levels of personalized design, personalized products and personalized services is requiring every business up through the extended B2C and B2B supply chains to find new ways to handle inventory, coordinate shipments, institute just-in-time procurement and planning, and manage its employees in very different ways. Again—in the face of those spiraling demands all centered around the emerging norm of digital business—can you keep up? Do you have the tools and technology that will help you not only survive but indeed thrive?

Here at ECI Solutions, we’ve spent the past 30 years helping companies just like yours build on your market expertise and strong reputation to drive even greater success in the future.

We do that by helping you select and then deploy the digital solutions that address your most-pressing business needs, whether that’s in accounting and finance, procurement, inventory management, logistics, supply chain, and more.

We fully understand—and agree with!—your desire to find some way to spend more of your time dazzling your customers and optimizing your operations, and your parallel desire to avoid having to become some sort of tech expert.

And because we’ve dealt with thousands of owners of small businesses, we’ve developed a keen understanding of what you need to make your business shine for the next 5 or 10 or 20 years.

• You want to be able to see what’s going on in your business from one end to the other, and you know you can no longer afford to try to do that with printouts and faxes and mismatched spreadsheets.
• You want to be able to move at the speed of your customers and be able to adapt instantly to their shifting needs and requirements.
• You want to minimize inventory costs without losing out on any sales opportunities.
• You want to be able to accommodate the changing and sometimes unpredictable needs of your employees without, again, losing out on any sales opportunities or limiting your ability to provide great service to every customer.
• And you want to be able to use data to understand where your company is today, and what the best path is for tomorrow.

We’re ready to help in any way that’s best for you. Our software applications are modular, so you can pick the ones you need most to get started and then build on that over time.

And because all of our solutions are offered through the cloud, you don’t have to invest in a lot of IT infrastructure and people. In fact, more and more of our customers are looking at us as their IT team.