Action plans boost business confidence

OVER the past months we have endeavoured to step outside our business and look at our transport industry from a stakeholder prospective.

Hopefully you have found this exercise beneficial. It is critical you have all the bits in place to ensure the stakeholders are confident in your business and that they are sure any association will be viable and worthwhile. What really ensures stakeholder confidence is seeing all of the processes and procedures in place that make your day-to-day activities functional and practical.

If we start with the accounting and financial procedures, we need to have a functional accounting system such as Quickbooks or MYOB to handle financial areas of your operation. A well set up accounting system can provide a great deal of important management information apart from profit and loss statements and balance sheets.

Quickbooks for example has Items and Classes which, if set up correctly, can provide profit and loss by truck or a particular set delivery. On the maintenance side, we use a computerised system called Fleetmate which is a purpose-built system for the transport industry.

Like all systems, the output is only as good as the input (GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out).

Fleetmate produces excellent tracking reports for individual equipment as well as overall fleet costs.

Most business owners get around with important information and things that need to be done in their heads.

We use a system of documented action plans with regular meetings to review and update these action plans. These action plans have five headings:

Objectives which are one-line statements of what needs to be done.

Actions which is a list of actions required to achieve the objective.

Progress which is used to keep the actions in focus and to ensure something is being done.

Responsibility which nominates the individual or individuals responsible for making the required action happen.

Completion Date for each action so that individuals are accountable for making the action happen.

Good processes and procedures make life on the road a whole lot easier, and your business valuable.