How Organizations can Leverage Productivity Tools?

Any healthy business – a huge company or a young start-up, is comprised of several departments working like the gears in a clock. If you wish to ensure your business succeed, all the gears ought to optimize each of their activities. These business activities are most crucial for its survival in today’s peak competitive environment.   

It is every CXOs solemn duty to pay prudent attention to the respective domain’s activities to ensure maximized its productivity. But it’s easier said than done. Do you desire to optimize your business operations and level up its productivity? Read this article if you have answered the question.   

COVID-19 pandemic had a staggering blow on various industries in the spell of one year. It had disrupted the supply chain, human resource management, demand for goods and services, led to the obsoleting assets and had a much more malicious effect.   

Due to the lack of supervision over the employees (working from home) there was a dwindling impact on their productivity. The government of many countries had imposed strict lockdowns and curfews disrupting the supply of many non-staple products and several services that could not have been provided over the internet. Only after noticing apparent adverse effects of shut businesses, the governments were propelled to partially open the lockdowns. Unfortunately, the damage was done. Business and professional travelers stayed put and were not able to render their services. Internal communication – an orchestration of the employees saw some disarrangement due to an unorganized online setup. It was a major setback for the new businesses and entrepreneurs of young start-ups.   

But we all noticed that certain nimble-witted business leaders knuckled down to tackle the COVID-19 situation by restructuring their organizations and implementing first-rate digital solutions. These leaders were decisive enough to modify their business model to a digital avenue.   

A hospital in South India used AI robots to attend to the COVID-19 patients at their facility to nullify their human resources shortage problem. While some hospitals in the western hemisphere used IoT technology to create an adaptable user interface that takes minimal human efforts to treat the patient. You can read more about this in IoB Blog.  

Several retail product companies turned their backs to their physical stores to develop their cutting-edge e-commerce websites. They raised from their nightmare of zero footfall at their retail outlets with the blessing of a gently flowing stream of website traffic.   

Communication was the worst-hit function of a business, be it between colleagues, partners, stakeholders or students and professors. Several enterprise tools have been commendable to date, incorporating communications between these parties.   

According to research conducted by Mckinsey and Co., the digital changes in various functions of a business brought into the organizations were much faster than what the organizations had expected it to be before the pandemic. The year 2020 saw the biggest leap in digital adaptation over the last 5 years.   

A business might abruptly cripple in complete or partial absence of a framework. Amid the pandemic, business leaders must mandatorily administer these domains with a robust foundation of digital enterprise solutions.   

 Enterprise Services:   

The sales department is termed as the front line of any business but there are several cross-functional departments in the organization which serve sales and each other respectively. It could be HR, Finance, IT, Admin or Legal department which are crucial to maintaining the harmony of business. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one of the most common solutions that are stapled and adopted to integrate business resources from various departmental perspective. For instance, while working on a project the ERP system will highlight information pertaining to various departments involved in the respective project. This indicates that finance or HR can collaborate with other departments viz. sales or customer support, to maintain fluency in decision making.  

ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have been the big players in the segment but in addition to that, there are several cost-effective systems available such as Bitrix24, Odoo and ERPNext. A well-synchronized cross-functional system would axe down the costs, minimize the wastages and optimize the production or service output. Thanks to the development of Cloud Tech Solutions, ERP can now be steered through clouds that are cost-efficient, highly mobile and has high storage capacity.   

 

Online Communication:   

Communication is the key to any collaboration, extending from intra-organization or inter-organization. Collaboration at the office set up between the employees, investors and board members have been agreeably convenient but the pandemic has induced Work-From-Home (WFH) as a custom for plenty of them. In a WFH set up, communication had been an explicit issue to which many collaborations software breached doors to be a savior and satisfied the need of the hour.   

Collaboration tools such as Teams Meeting, Zoom Meeting, GoToMeeting, Skype and a great many are available for collaborations and web conferencing. A Forrester study on The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Teams found that businesses that empowered their employees with the Teams collaboration tool replaced 150 average overnight trips with online meetings within 3 years of implementation. They also discovered that there was about 18.9% reduction in meetings each week and that 45 minutes per week are saved by first-line workers collaborating with colleagues.   

Asset management:   

Assets are the most valuable investment for an organization, it could be purchased assets or built by the organization, they could be tangible or intangible. With such high dominance of capital invested, it urges the management to label it as the priority. Asset management software provides solutions to problems such as accounting of asset value, management of asset life cycle and development of assets.   

With emerging trends in technology, inventory management has gradually turned out to be unchallenging for management. Inventory reports are possibly dispensed in a blink of an eye, with these reports the software uses Business Intelligence to digitize the procurement process. Speaking of assets, appreciation and depreciation are inevitable elements. Accounting of assets which was a tiring process is now facilitated by the asset management software with its ‘Asset Lifecycle’ function.   

Adding to the tangible assets, it also has room for digital and intangible assets – photos, audio files, videos, contract PDFs, brand guideline, design, patents, trademarks copyrights or even software licenses developed by the company.    

Project Management:   

Managing a project is undeniably a complex and wearying task for the operations managers, that was previously planned and governed manually. With the help of ever-evolving technology, automated and BI powered project tools have enabled managements to pro-actively take decisions and effectuate the projects expeditiously. PM software capacitates your workforce to strategically work on multiple projects at a given point of time in a synchronized manner. It will facilitate services like multi-project scheduling, employee task management, project communication tools, Gantt charts and much more to oil the wheels of your project.    

Adjunct to these four primary productivity tools, there is certain software that are exceptionally insightful and genius development of mankind for the modern business management. We are enveloped by technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science that are minimizing the human efforts by: 

• Automating operations 
• Organizing supply chain 
• Building business report
• Sharing Information  
• Collaborating employee 
• Providing security  
• Enhancing user experience 

Speaking of reducing human efforts, Data-Driven Assembly Lines, have proven to be a boon to the secondary sector. It helps manufacturers to integrate Machine Learning Software with the machinery to transform it into smart machinery unit and escalate its output. Data, which is termed as the most valuable asset for companies, has grown exponentially in size and importance in the past two decades. Management of data has become the paramount objective of companies looking to accelerate their business. Data management and its pertinent usage can amplify the productivity level as it would be more streamlined, organized and the workforce is savvy about where to find the right information.    

Enterprise solutions have smoothed the path of business managers by automating processes and reducing operational costs in the past few decades. Systems such as IoT and ERP have organized data and information flow and have also renovated inter-departmental associations. It is beyond question that in the upcoming future, we will be witnessing technology surpassing the dimensions of its existing business applications.   

To make your organization future-ready, do reach out to us for a FREE consultation on your most pressing business problems.