As your business grows and competition gets tougher, many organizations look harder for ways to lower operation costs to remain competitive. As a company specializing in web applications and business efficiency, we recommend checking your organization in the following areas as a starting point. These are a few places where you can cut costs without compromising the quality of your goods and services.
1. Does my organization’s staff spend a significant amount of time on accessing and centralizing information?
Accessing information from various people, places, or even multiple stand-alone systems often becomes a huge problem for mid-sized and large organizations. As a result, time spent on providing clients’ with information significantly increases. Many oil and gas companies today still face the challenge of centralizing and systemizing information from their vendors. Organizations lacking an efficient way to centralize information and documentation often spend a significant amount of time on creating reports or documentation in the event of an audit.
Having a centralized document storage or getting a secure web application should be a top priority. Many organizations greatly cut back operation costs by lowering the time wasted on people waiting to access information.
2. Has your team complained about challenges in collaboration and assigning resources?
Before we talk about any details, let us do a quick check. How many people will be able to report the exact status of all their pending tasks within 5 minutes? Some of the common complaints regarding team collaboration refer to not being aware of others’ work statuses and resource assignments. When project teams exceed more than five members, these problems become more serious. Many projects have unnecessarily high costs due to the lack of effective teamwork.
While, managing small numbers of people, assigning tasks to team members can be easily done. However, with a larger staff, it becomes more difficult to manage and monitor the workers’ productivity without a proper system in place. This is a huge problem for any organization.
Productivity is raised when workers work better and more efficiently with each other. Transparency and timely delivery of critical details for collaboration are crucial. Web applications are the most effective way to achieve transparency and timely updates. Many organizations use it as the platform for all of their employees to perform their job tasks. With it, managers can easily oversee workloads, statuses, and distribute work tasks to specific members or teams.
3. Does your staff feel there is a broken process or slowness within the operation?
Let us use an approval process as an example here. The business approval process takes time and people often waste valuable minutes, hours, or even days on feedback. With emails, the processes are indeed much easier to manage. However, they often get lost or misplaced. Emails cannot remind you of tasks that need to be taken care of. Web application becomes your best assistant in keeping track of all these tasks. You can set different statuses for your process and turn it into a streamlined workflow to help you prioritize and organize, notify yourself or the next person, and check back as needed. A great application should simply update the task status, and upload related documents with the click of a button. The system will automatically notify the next person or group in charge, inside and outside of the organization.
4. I feel my business is already very efficient. But why is my cost still so much higher than my competitors?
How much can we see from the surface? Continuing, repetitive, and detailed data analysis will help discover the facts behind the scenes.
It is essential to continually update and reassess your operation’s efficiency as the market changes and your business expands. One can only improve when able to pinpoint areas where they are lacking. In the past, problems became known only once profits began taking hits. Now, businesses are beginning to recognize the importance of self-conducted analysis and how many underlining problems can be revealed with such analyses. Current technology can turn even the most complicated logic into program codes which will perform the analysis for you. This can significantly save time and greatly increase productivity, especially when the process is highly repetitive.
The list goes on and on and so far we have barely skimmed the surface of cost-cutting techniques with technology. Each business’ case is unique. If you work with your business and closely analyze its processes and costs, you will find areas where costs can be cut. As a business owner or leader, it is important to collaborate with the opinions of others and share common issues. Before you know it, you will see an easy path to resolve your problems.
If you experience any of the items listed above, the next step is to meet with your team for an in-depth discussion. As always, when your operation changes, new things may come up. Continual and repetitive productivity analyses is a model for long-term success. Feel free to contact us and ask for assistance! To know more about SunNet, click here to download our brochure.
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