The Holy Grail for the vast majority of firms is to find ways to work more efficiently – to produce the best product with the least outlay yet still maintain quality and consumer satisfaction.
While these aims might have once proved frustratingly elusive for many companies (particularly Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs)), today’s modern technology is more than capable of stepping up and helping drive greater productivity in your business.
Indeed, the so-called Digitalization of Business is leading many business analysts to suggest we might very well be in the throes of a fourth industrial revolution – a time when man and machine coexist in harmony in the workplace, leading to increased efficiency and vastly reduced overheads.
If you’re looking for ways your company could embrace modern tech and start making savings, read on for some top tips.
Move your company’s digital services to the cloud
There’s little doubting the tremendous influence computers, tech and the web have had on business and the world in general – so much so that, today, it’s almost impossible to think of any firm that doesn’t have a reliance on IT and digital services.
However, while once the onus lay very much squarely with firms to set up and maintain in-house networks, with today’s modern advances in hardware, software and (in particular) connection speeds, outsourcing IT has become the norm. For example, just a cursory look at Azure training videos will let you see just how much this and other similar cloud technologies could do for your business.
Moving your firm’s IT to a cloud service provider will bring numerous benefits, including (but not limited to):
- Hugely reduced overheads and mitigated headaches of trying to run internal IT networks
- Access to the latest, fastest and most capacious hardware
- Scalability and agility in the workplace to take a proactive stance against changing market conditions
- 24/7/365 support and backup when you need it
- Bulletproof, industry-leading protection against cybercriminals
- The ability to make your team truly mobile by providing a central repository for essential files and software
- Increased collaborative working capacity
Look to automating anything and everything
It’s little secret that business is going digital and, alongside this general blurring of the boundaries between your real-world and online commercial activities, has come an increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is particularly adept at performing time-consuming, repetitive tasks – just the kinds of jobs that typically represent a sinkhole for firms in terms of both time and resources. You should look to automating these tasks wherever and whenever possible so you can free up staff to work on more lucrative and profitable tasks.
Embrace AI to get a better insight into how your firm operates
In today’s increasingly digital business landscape, most firms produce vast swathes of data on a daily basis – data that can be interpreted to provide a very useful insight into your company’s processes.
In essence, any data your firm produces can be interrogated and interpreted either manually or by AI to give you a better overhead view of productivity and can even help you with forward-planning and decision-making.
