Marketing is a wonderful business tool. It tells us what we think we need to know and then encourages us to go and purchase the ‘solution’ to all our business problems. But things are fast changing and technology now allows us to reduce our operational costs and increase our productivity.
The standard in most offices is a scanner, fax machine and at least one printer. Mostly they are connected to each other, but not necessarily. Now imagine that you go see a client and have a pocket scanner with you. You scan all the documents you need, push a button and it automatically uploads to your server (at your office or in the CLOUD). Along the way back to the office you take a client for lunch, you record the meeting on your phone and then send the mp3 file to your server and it is automatically saved into the client file. The waiter brings you the bill and you whip out your phone, photograph the bill and again send to your server. It’s all there when you need it, scanned, categorised and filed. How much time and money has this simple process saved you?
Before I get to the bit where I tell you how you can have all this, I must first ask:
· What is it that your business needs?
· What is your current work flow process?
· What business sector are you in?
· What do you already have?
· Who are you working with and do they truly understand your business?
The issue with technology for most of us is that it appears to be so complicated. We have sales people ‘selling’ us stuff and we hardly understand what they are saying. It all sounds a bit like gibberish, but the money bit kind of makes sense, so we go with it and once we have our new operational tool in place, we become frustrated because it does not really fit our needs. Now what?
I would like to suggest that you:
· Spend more time assessing what you need then meet with a number of people and see if they can provide you with the solutions that you are looking for and not what they are wanting to sell you.
· You want to work with someone who has taken the time to listen to you and your specific business needs.
· You would like them to present you with a solution that will enhance your workflow and streamline your operations and of course help reduce costs.
· You want your workflow to be accessible from anywhere and at any time
· You want to know that it is safe and secure where it is virtually stored
· You want to work with a team who are always accessible to assist you and certainly not one’s that sell and run.
So… where do we find these magic solutions? After doing much research and market scouring I made a short list of one company – firstcoast. What I liked about them was:
· They sat with me and assessed my workflow
· They did an audit of what we already had and how we utilised them
· We went through our budgets so we could establish what our admin operational costs were
· They went away and came back a short while later with a tailor-made solution that worked specifically for my business.
As you can imagine, being in the media world we are inundated with paper, emails that never end and notes that are made all over the place by various team members as we work on media stories. Now we have a system that literally works at the touch of a button on our laptops, tablets, smartphones and we are all able to access any file at any giving time, add to the story, make notes, upload mp3 audio interview files and leave instructions for the next researcher. It just works for us.
Cheers, I say to technology that works for us!
Ingrid von Stein is director of possibilities at Indigo Zebra Communications /eBiz Radio – Global Media
IMAGE: Nashua SA
