Advisory practices can significantly improve practice efficiency to enhance their advice model and address industry reforms by implementing a single operational platform, rather than using multiple software systems.
"Practice efficiency is the key to success long term. The use of technology is the key driver in practice efficiency," Evolve Logic director Stephen Bell told financial planners at the Association of Financial Advisers GenXt Roadshow in Sydney yesterday.
Bell said practices could use planning software through a single, core operational platform to achieve the most efficiency gains.
"If you're paying for 100 per cent of a piece of software, we need to use 100 per cent of the functionality out of that system," he said.
"We also want to use that software for everything that we do in the practice."
A previous client with 100 staff was using up to nine different software systems, he said.
"There was no efficiency there whatsoever," he said.
The result of implementing and using an operational system was that businesses could cut processing time in half and therefore potentially double their prospect intake without any additional client resources, as well as discover that certain resources were not required, he said.
In addition, every time a business decision is made, it should be referenced back to the operational system to ensure it can manage a particular product, such as an insurance policy.
"What we find when you actually start to look at your practice is that documentation actually runs everything you do," Bell said.
"So get the operational platform to do all the work.
"If you look at the statistics, about 80 per cent of the time spent in document management systems is actually trying to retrieve a document because it's been misfiled. That's not something that we can afford in this industry."
While results would come from implementation, there was no silver bullet, he said.
