automation

09/02/2022 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

4 Impactful Ways to Innovate and Grow Your Business

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Are you growing your business? In business, if you’re not innovating, you’re falling behind. Innovation is key to keeping up with your competitors, showing customers that your company is still relevant, and maintaining an engaged workforce. Implementing digital technology into your business is not as complicated or overwhelming as it may seem. These days, business owners have countless affordable and intuitive tools at their disposal to streamline everyday tasks and spur business growth. Check out the following tips to learn how you can make digital improvements to your business!

Leverage Business Process Management to Grow Your Business

Business Process Management (BPM) describes the practice of streamlining and automating regular business tasks to reduce laborious business operations and menial work. As a result of BPM, businesses can find more time for projects that have an impact on the growth of their company. In other words, BPM will enable you and your team to focus on progress rather than maintenance.

The temporary workers work best alongside other solutions like outsourcing and robotic process automation (RPA). In tandem, BPM and automation tools will reduce errors and re-orient your business processes around your customers. Most important, be sure to monitor the effectiveness of your BPM improvements so you can make continuous optimizations. You can find out more about BPM with this guide to automating your digital workflow.

Invest in Time Management Tools

Good time management skills are essential if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur. Without these skills, you may find yourself spending too much time on activities that have very little impact on your business. Some other symptoms of poor time management typically include poor punctuality, missed deadlines, procrastination, slow progress, and a feeling that you’re constantly rushing from one thing to another.

Thankfully, the right tools can help you solve your time management challenges and squeeze far more productive time out of your workday. For example, a calendar app can help you track meetings and deadlines, project management software can help you break down large projects into small, more manageable tasks, and time tracking software will give you more insight into where all that time is going.

When it comes to the marketing side of your business, look into a free logo maker tool to not only get inspiration for your logo but to quickly create eye-catching graphics that you can customize using templates. Once done, you can share your logo across all your print and digital media platforms. It can all be done in a matter of minutes.

Automate Your Customer Support to Grow Your Business

If there’s one thing businesses spend a lot of time on, it’s customer support. What if you could automate most of your support tasks? With the right applications, you can! Start by empowering your customers to find their own information by creating a FAQ page or knowledge base on your website. Answer all of those repetitive customer support questions so your customers won’t have to get in touch to find an answer.

Better yet, install a chatbot on your website! Customers who interact with chatbots are more engaged, satisfied, and likely to stick around and buy something. You don’t need special coding skills to place a chatbot on your website. Business2Community suggests a few helpful tools that you can use to create a chatbot on your own. Once you have a chatbot up and running, program it with your most common customer questions to provide your customers with 24/7 automated support.

Grow Your Business with Personalized Marketing

Personalization is another great way to improve customer engagement. According to TechTarget, personalized marketing can improve conversions, increase custom retention, and encourage social sharing to spread brand awareness. Personalized marketing involves tailoring your marketing message to individual consumers rather than targeting a wide range of customers with the same material. Data is key to personalized marketing. Using data about your target audience or customers will enable you to create content that caters specifically to their interests and behaviors.

If you want your business to thrive and grow, it’s important that you’re constantly innovating. Effective business innovation means finding faster, smarter ways to work, opening up new revenue opportunities, and generating higher profits through cost savings. Take advantage of BPM, automation, and all the technology that’s available to you!

01/09/2019 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

Your End Of Year ERP Checklist

Running ERP software in your business will make it much more efficient, and you will be able to get a lot more done this way. Many of the systems and processes that used to take a lot of time, or that you had to delegate either to a staff member or to a third party (which could be expensive) can now be done automatically by whichever ERP you are running.

It doesn’t mean, however, that you can just ‘set and forget’ at this time of year. As the year draws to a close, you should take the opportunity before heading off on your holiday break, to make sure that your ERP is working exactly as you want it to. Follow our handy checklist, and you can go home for the holidays without worrying about it at all.

Back It Up

Although everything you do on an ERP program should automatically be stored in the cloud, it is worth checking this to ensure that it actually is happening. If not, and something was to happy to your office and computers, would you be able to recover those files? It would be unlikely unless there were another backup somewhere.

Backing up your work is one of the most critical elements to being prepared and in control and Dobson.net offers some great reasons why. You do it in the hopes that you never have to use that backup, but it is there if you do need it and that offers you complete peace of mind. Plus, it is no longer such a time-consuming task. You can even leave it running in the background while you use the computer for other things such as online Christmas shopping or Unibet games.

It’s not just a matter of hitting the button and thinking it’s all done though; you should check that the file is readable and complete once the backup is finished. Then you can step away knowing that the backup is ready.

Check The Automation

The point of an ERP is to automate many processes. This could include, amongst other things:

Contract renewals
Customers data updates
Newsletters (check out TriDigital Marketing for why a newsletter will benefit your business)
Price changes across your business

However, when was the last time you checked that your automation was doing what you want it to do? Now is the perfect time to do just that. You can ensure that newsletters are being posted with the right information and that your lists are up to date. You can also check the frequency of any updates and backups. It won’t take more than a few minutes to check that everything is working in the way you want it to, but that check can save a lot of problems further down the line.

Make Hard Copies

Although this is not something that you will normally find advocated on many cloud pages, making a hard copy of the most important contracts, invoices, and other documents is a good idea. Print them out and keep them in a secure, fireproof safe, ideally away from the office if you can. It could include payroll information and financial records that will be needed for tax purposes. It is better to be safe than sorry, and having one extra copy of the most important documents for your business certainly can’t hurt. If the absolute worst were to happen, you could still continue trading.

05/13/2016 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

The Drive-thru Supermarket Shop of the Future

A concept dreamed up by a Russian inventor could mean the end of the weekly supermarket car park nightmare if it comes to fruition. There’ll be no more trawling around, waiting for shoppers to load up their boots and go, no more parent and child space faux-pas... It’ll be heaven in a Honda as consumers won’t have to even get out of their cars to stock up on life’s essentials!

Here’s how it’ll work, according to Semenov Dahir Kurmanbievich, who has previously filed a patent for an innovative dentist drill that can repair tooth cavities as it goes along.

The drive-through supermarket will look something like a fully-enclosed petrol station, with dozens of vertical conveyor carousels, all bearing the groceries and dry goods you’d expect to see in a regular shop. These belts will be in almost constant motion, so the durable industrial chains from Renold would be a good investment for the construction company.

Shoppers drive up to these belts and reach through their window to scroll through each shelf using a touchscreen, then they simply pick up their items and place them on another belt, which takes them to a staffed kiosk to be scanned. The scanner operator rings them up and bags them, then takes a card payment before handing the bags back to the driver in time-honoured fashion.

So far so good – this new idea speeds up the shopping process, prevents the huge frustration around parking spaces and then “losing” your car when you come out if you have a poor sense of direction. However, is Dahir’s idea likely to replace traditional supermarkets? The answer is no, not likely.

A handy addition

As great as a drive-thru supermarket sounds, it’s likely to occupy the same sector space as drive-thru fast food places – a handy option for those in a hurry. It’s possible that larger branches of traditional supermarkets will use drive-thrus as add-ons to existing premises for commuters and time-pressed customers, rather than rebuilding altogether.

Staffing levels in this Brave New Waitrose will need to be higher than in the main building – one operator per kiosk – and the upper floor warehouse workers are another cost consideration. They’ll be working constantly to keep their belts filled, and there may need to be on-site engineers to help with problems – “…frozen chicken jam in Kiosk Five…” might become a regular backdrop to a grocery run.

Because of these factors, it’s likely that the drive-thru shopping option (shoption?) will carry a surcharge to cover these increased costs. Given how willing customers are to pay online delivery charges, it shouldn’t be a problem, but it will limit the customer base somewhat.

There’s also the fact that there will be at any one time dozens of cars and motorbikes in an enclosed building. How will the emissions be dealt with? It’ll be impossible to keep the air clean and safe, quite frankly, so it may well be the case that only electric cars are allowed on the premises – brave new world indeed!