Generally, increasing sales is the way to pump up profitability. But often that same result can be achieved by increasing efficiency.

work more efficiently in order to save money and increase profitability. This article looks at two examples: financial management and supplier relationships.

Can you benefit from better financial management?

An online financial management application can deliver financial information in a more timely way, reduce administrative costs and improve business planning and communication.

Here are four questions to ask yourself that might help you determine if it's time to use online processing to improve your company's financial management:

1. Is your company able to forecast expenses easily?
2. Does it take longer to generate financial reports or close your books than you would like?
3. Do you know the costs and time associated with each of your financial management processes? Would you like to be able to reduce these costs?
4. Do you spend a lot of time generating manual financial reports for investors or creditors?

What can an online financial management application do for you?

There are a number of ways to use e-business to get a better handle on your financial operations. Here is just a sampling:

• Core financial processes. Capture and streamline information flow from your general ledger activities.
• Planning and analysis. Manage and control budgets for various departments, including forecasting, budgeting, cost analysis and performance management.
• Treasury. Manage your company's cash position to minimize financial risk exposure, including cash management and electronic banking.
• Revenue management and electronic customer credit. Shrink the customer order-to-cash cycle and enable electronic bill present and payment (EBPP), instant credit, accounts receivables, and collections.

Can you improve relations with suppliers?

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way companies work with their suppliers. If your company is dependent on suppliers, e-business offers a wide variety of ways to cut down on redundancy, reduce communications problems, improve efficiency, minimize inventories, enhance quality and improve profitability.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that might help you determine if your company can benefit from using e-business to work more efficiently with suppliers:

• Do you think you could cut costs and improve your margins by making your interaction with suppliers more efficient?
• How quickly are you able to communicate with your suppliers about problems or opportunities?
• Would you like to be able to take use a larger pool of suppliers but feel constrained by geography, paperwork, communications or other factors?

What can supplier management do for you?

There are a number of ways that e-business can help you streamline your relations with key suppliers, for example:

• Product development. Design better products and services faster by providing suppliers with direct, timely input on what customers want.
• Planning. Do a better job of matching future customer demand to available supply and fulfill more orders on time and at a lower cost.
• Distribution and logistics. Ensure that you have the proper number of products in the right place at the right time and at the lowest possible cost.
• Purchasing. Streamline your procurement process to reduce the money and time spent on purchasing activities.
• Manufacturing. Pinpoint and eliminate areas of overproduction, material movement, over processing, excess inventory and bottlenecks.
• Business partner integration. Take better advantage of partner strengths so you can stay focused on what you do best.

For example, a small piano manufacturer was having a hard time controlling production costs. When demand declined, the manufacturer was saddled with high inventory carrying charges.

When demand increased rapidly, the manufacturer faced higher prices on rushed supply orders. An e-business solution for working with suppliers enabled the company to keep closer tabs on what was selling at retail outlets, enabling managers to vary production runs according to actual customer buying patterns and avoid dramatic swings in stock