How To Drastically Improve Your Business Productivity Through Technology

In the modern business world, your competitive advantage is purely driven by how tech-driven your business is. In one of her articles on IdeaCafe, Jayla Barnsen had proposed five tips to enhance the technology process in your business. One of the most critical pieces of advice was to finalize on a long term plan to deploy technology at business to make life easier while dealing with workers, suppliers and customers. This article will take you through a brief overview of how this can be achieved.

Establish Your Business Process

The first step towards overhauling your business’ technology infrastructure is by identify the various processes that go into running your business and measure the time it takes to complete them. For example, if you have a small manufacturing plant, the processes will involve steps like “transporting raw material from warehouse to the shop floor”, “using furnace to melt the raw material”, “using machine 1 to pour raw material to mould”, etc. You may hire a lean manufacturing consultant to assist you in building this process sheet. For jobs that involve computer operations, you could create a list of activities like “entering inventory details on Excel sheet”, “email supplier to renew order”, etc.

Identify The Process Bottlenecks

Once the business process has been established, the next step is identify the bottlenecks in your process. To do this, identify the tasks that take the most time to get completed. For instance, one of the most common bottlenecks is the time it takes for the supplier to fulfill an order. Other common bottlenecks in small businesses are signing a contract and hiring an employee. Each of these processes take several weeks to get completed on an average. As a thumb rule, all business processes that take 10% more time than the median process should be considered a bottle neck.

Find The Right Technology Tool To Reduce These Processes

The next step is to identify technology tools that can bring down the lead time of all these bottle neck processes so that the median time drops by at least 50%. One of the easiest ways to do this is by deploying an ERP system for your business. ERP tools automate the inventory management, recruitment process and financial accounting process of your business to a great extent that helps in drastically reducing the median time. Other than ERP, other common technology tools to help you reduce ERP is by replacing physical contracts with digital contracts (that can bring down the lead time from several days to a few hours), making use of outsourcing tools to reduce in-house labor and instead replacing them with on-demand third party labor, etc.

Perform A Cost-Benefit Analysis

The next step is to perform a cost benefit analysis. While technology tools can drastically bring down process lead times, they are often not used because of the capital cost involved. A cost benefit analysis will help you look at the overall cost of deployment and the savings that it will bring to the business in terms of time and money. You can also use this step to identify the various alternative tools to fix the same problem. For instance, traditional ERP systems could cause several hundred thousand dollars to implement. However, you can pick an alternate cloud solution like NetSuite (in Canada) or JD Edwards that can bring down the cost to a few hundred dollars a month.

Deploy, Rinse & Repeat

Once you have finalized the technology tools to go with, hire a consultant or use your own IT team to implement these tools at your work place. Once the processes have been established, repeat these steps all over again every few months. This will not only give you a feedback on how well the deployed tools have been performing, but will also help you identify other minor processes that may have been ignored in the earlier assignment. Over time, these steps will help your business identify all fluff in your business and would help you replace them with efficient technology tools that will make you an extremely efficient and lean organization.