In times of such economic hardship, businesses find themselves having to make some tough decisions. What to cut, where to cut it from and even whether or not to keep the doors open. Unfortunately just like the radio, teevee and other media are telling us, these times are here. It’s no longer a whisper on the wind or a murmur around the water cooler; nope, its here and it doesn’t look like the problems are going to be solved in the short term.
But what can a business owner do to cut costs, stay profitable and help keep his fellow employees, employeed?
While there aren’t a lot of options out there, and there’s certainly no one single answer that spans the gap for all business models. There is one option for those businesses with high rates of data entry and repetative office work and its called Automation. Automation is and always has been about saving: time, money and hopefully jobs. Many employees will cringe at the idea of having their job automated, thinking to themselves; “Oh great, now they don’t need me!”. Believe me, I know. Several years ago it was my primary function at my employers to sit with the various clerical employees, review their workload and assess what could be done to increase their productivity. Of course the employees I sat with looked at me as if I was death incarnate. Needless to say, I wasn’t the most popular person in the office.
Of course what they didn’t realize was I wasn’t taking away their jobs. But instead, I was making them more productive, freeing them up to perform other tasks and therefore making the business more profitable as a whole. By freeing up existing employees to perform other tasks, I was saving my employer from needing to hire further help. I personally believe that I very well could have been saving their jobs.
So now you may be wondering “how can I automate my office?”
The simplest approach is to focus on automating those business processes that are most time-consuming, costly, or profit-generating. At times, the choice will also depend upon the cost and complexity of the proposed software and services. To help cut some of your development cost, I cannot stress enough, the importance of defining and documenting the manual process toroughly prior to bringing in your chosen developer. It is typically less expensive to document the process in-house, rather than having your developer do it for you. Once you have your shiny new documentation to pass to your developer, they will be armed with exactlly what they need to give you an accurate estimate, as it will take out much of their guess work. So once again, I would emphasize that it’s important that the manual process be well defined before automating.
I'll write something soon.
