As a marina manager, you know that streamlined processes are essential for a smooth-running operation. With optimized operations, you’ll be able to provide the best possible experience for your boaters, ensure repeat customers, increase your revenue, grow your business, and have a higher return on your investment.
So, what can you do to streamline your operations and achieve operational excellence?
You can’t know where to go without knowing where you’ve been. The first step is to list your current processes and workflows along with any documentation and rank them in order of operational importance. For example, the process of booking a long-term slip rental would be critical from both an internal and a customer-facing perspective.
Identify which of your processes are inefficient, take up too much time, cause you to lose money, create friction for your team or boaters, or produce data entry errors. Asking for assistance is a great way to get buy-in from your staff, making it easier for them to make the transition to new processes.
As a marina manager, you should focus on optimizing your tech stack, process automation, and data analysis for the greatest return on your efforts. Then, add in a continuous improvement strategy to stay ahead.
Maintaining and using a wide variety of platforms and applications is one of the biggest challenges facing marina managers. In addition to draining your budget, you may struggle with:
Fortunately, you can avoid all of these issues by consolidating your tech stack. An all-in-one marina management platform is a great defense against technology inefficiencies, offering native features, built-in integrations, and open application programming interfaces (open API). You will quickly learn that virtually anything is possible with a platform that can connect to your existing and ideal integrations.
Automation quickly streamlines operations, providing the ability to do more with less. According to a business automation survey, 88% of small to medium businesses can compete with larger companies because of automation.
As a marina manager, you face internal operational demands as you ensure your boaters have a great experience and you spend resources wisely which becomes more complex as you scale your business. Process automation can help you do it all.
Marina reservation software optimizes both front-end and back-end operations. For example, the right platform will automate the reservation process from finding available slips or rental boats through payment and check-in and even updating the boater record in real time. This automated process frees your staff from many front desk processes to focus on helping your boaters create great memories.
Automated processes also create the capacity for you to use business data to further streamline your operations.
Your business data is the most insightful tool in your tech stack.
If you are using outdated software to store data, it can become difficult to find the information you need, such as seasonal booking rates, boater slip reservation history, and more. Instead, the valuable data generated from every interaction should be stored in a consolidated tech stack, enabling you to use the information to streamline processes for you and your staff.
Front desk. Having information about boaters at their fingertips saves your front desk crew time and makes them more efficient. For example, your team can quickly review that boater’s prior purchases to make relevant cross-selling or upselling recommendations.
Maintenance and housekeeping. Fast access to property history lets you schedule work that your maintenance or housekeeping staff can view in their portal on their mobile device as they work independently throughout the day. For the ultimate process optimization, the best marina management platform will let you send maintenance alerts or housekeeping tasks in the same way, notifying them in real time about urgent repair needs and the details they need.
Management. Without consolidated data, digging through multiple software and applications to find the information you need and creating financial and operational reports can be time-consuming. For smoother operations, a marina management platform can combine your data and automatically generate the reports you need, delivering them to you when you want to receive them.
Creating operational efficiency is a never-ending process. As you streamline your processes, you’ll start to notice your business growing which is a good thing, but it does create new issues.
A continuous improvement strategy lets you address these growth-generated operational challenges as they pop up by regularly conducting the same analysis and improvement process. Fortunately, once you’ve learned how to streamline a process using marina software, it gets easier every time.
Are you ready to see the benefits of streamlined operations? The right reservation management system supports reviewing and optimizing your processes so you can achieve operational excellence. In our guide, Achieving Operational Excellence, we discuss how marina management software makes running your business easier by: