5 Ways Technology Can Help You Scale Your Business Operations
Technology exists to make lives easier and workers more productive. That makes it an incredibly powerful tool for a growing business, especially one that needs to optimize its internal operations. The right programs and devices can automate administrative work and data analysis, which saves time for workers to create new plans or products, or do creative work that machines cannot handle on their own.
Password Management
A growing business will need accounts with a huge number of digital services, from simple mailing programs to vendors and banks. Security is vital for all of those things, and choosing the right password is the core of that security. Unfortunately, most people cannot manage to remember a unique password for each service. That is a serious problem because it means that compromising one of those services will give an attacker the credentials that they need to access all of the others. In contrast, the use of unique passwords would provide a way to limit the damage to a single account
Smart businesses use password managers to deal with that problem. Workers only need one password to use the manager, which will then generate and automatically apply a unique password for each service. An attacker could still break into every account at once if they stole the manager’s master password, but the odds of that are low as long as workers maintain good security practices. If they do that, they can get all of the security of using unique passwords with none of the inconvenience that can come with it.
CRM Software
Customers are the lifeblood of every business, but it can be hard to manage all of them. While CRM softwarecannot completely remove the human touch from customer relations, it can greatly simplify the process. These programs can track customers and their purchases, then analyze that information to help to optimize sales and marketing. Trained workers are capable of doing most of the work by hand, but computers can do it much faster, and thus at a significantly lower cost. Automating the simple parts makes it possible for humans to focus on the rest of the work, so the business will get much more done in the same amount of time if it uses CRM software to augment its workers.
Cloud Storage
Expanding into a second facility is a major milestone for any business, but it can complicate file storage. Workers may need data that is stored in a computer in the other building. They can usually get it via a digital mailing service, but that is inconvenient and requires the help of another worker.
Instead, many businesses turn to cloud storage. That allows them to store all of their data in a central server, and then download to any computer that needs it. That is an incredibly versatile system, and it makes it possible for digital workers to get their job done regardless of where they are at the time.
Automated Ordering
Inventory is complicated for small business, and it only gets more complex as the business expands and needs to get new products from new suppliers. That produces a huge amount of administrative work, and mistakes in that work can lead to massive problems for the business. Fortunately, computers are fairly good at tracking items and even ordering more of them when the supplies start to run low. A business can reduce their administrative labor requirements by investing in inventory software that can automate the work. Humans still need to provide some inputs and supervision, but they will not need to deal with the repetitive parts of the job.
Gathering Data
Knowledge is power. Many businesses send out surveys to their customers in order to gauge their satisfaction and find out if there are any more products or services that the business can provide. Sending out the messages and sorting through the data by hand is a huge project, and computers are much better at that sort of thing than humans. A worker can simply create a survey or a message, add a mailing list, and have the computer send it out and deal with the replies once they come in.
