3 Technology Mistakes You Could Be Making In Business

In business, your margin could be increased in two ways – by increasing the selling price of your product or by decreasing the cost in manufacturing the product. Tinkering with the selling price can have a dramatic effect on the volumes sold and hence the revenue. It is hence that the most important job for any business owner is to find the fluff in the business process and fix them so that you may reduce the cost of manufacturing a product.

Thanks to the proliferation in technology, it is now possible to drastically reduce the cost of manufacturing. Here are some mistakes that your business could be doing which may need to be addressed immediately.

Not Using The Right Tender System

If your business gets a lot of components sourced from third party vendors, then you may be deploying tenders to find the right manufacturers. Due to the complexity of the system, most businesses decide to either hand-pick the potential vendors from a small pool or publish the tendering process on newspapers. In both these cases, it is difficult to find the right manufacturer since the only way to evaluate the several bids is through the quoted bid. By replacing this with an online service like Alibaba or TradeKey, it is possible to get reviews of potential manufacturers, order samples and be sure that the manufacturer is the best partner to be working with.

Not Optimizing Your Inventory

A lot of businesses still handle all their inventory and order details on Microsoft Excel. While users have caught on to this level of data digitization, it is still an expensive mistake not using software to optimize inventory. To understand why, consider this: in a spreadsheet-based inventory management system, the onus of keeping track of inventory available lies with the manager. This results in a number of cases where supplies do not get ordered on time due to manual error. By deploying an ERP solution from Oracle JD Edwards or NetSuite, businesses can rely on software solutions to keep track of the various inventory levels and ensure that the software automates the order replenishment process without the need for manual interference. This ensures that there is no delay in the manufacturing process.

Not Taking Security Seriously

This is one of the biggest mistakes that businesses do. A common presumption that most businesses have is that since they are small and unknown, they do not face the risk of data theft and hacking. Contrary to this perception, small businesses are the biggest targets for hackers. Also, with recent news about the NSA PRISM revelations and the HeartBleed bug, your business faces massive risks online if security is not taken seriously.

Technology is getting cheaper by the day. Consequently, the cost of not using them is increasing commensurately. It is important for businesses to identify the latest technology trends and deploy them at work in order to grow better than competition.