We frequently hear about tech-related success stories coming from small business startups across the country. Entrepreneurs in a variety of industries have managed to make their new companies competitive through innovation and leveraging emerging technologies to their advantage. But if you’re in charge of a long-standing successful business or prefer an old school approach to your operations, you might be hesitant about adopting those digital solutions. After all, there’s a good reason why people say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Why pay for a cloud service or hire an IT consultant, you might ask? And it’s a fair question. Understanding NetStandard and other services such as Office 365 will help you identify the potential gains to your business processes, and make an informed decision on exactly what kind of solutions you might need. Here are some points to consider:
Scalable solutions for manufacturing
When your business deals with production and distribution, profitability can fluctuate with several factors. Supplier prices and quality, transportation costs, and timeframes can all change. Customer demand may also vary with the season or trend changes.
Custom made data solutions help you aggregate data that matters to your company and track products across multiple locations and different parts of the supply chain in real time. Instead of relying on a dedicated workforce, you deploy software instead, allowing you to call up the information you need in a matter of clicks. Being able to oversee the big picture in detail lets your organization respond swiftly to changes that would affect your manufacturing timeline and profit margins.
Administrative efficiency
For a lot of heavily regulated businesses, constantly changing or updating rules and requirements for compliance can present an enormous administrative hassle. At the same time, the sensitive nature of customer data understandably makes these businesses hesitant to embrace full data integration with the cloud.
If you operate in the healthcare, financial, or legal industries, you’ll be glad to know that cloud computing ensures there’s always a backup for your data even if a server goes offline. Also, most data breaches today are the result of old security vulnerabilities that could’ve been easily patched and addressed, as well as human error, neglect, or misuse. All of these factors are internally controllable with the proper training of your personnel for cybersecurity protocols.
By migrating your data to the cloud, you can benefit from the streamlining of administrative tasks, and better collaboration and inter-departmental functions. It also helps your company go paperless and observe eco-friendly practices while eliminating the risk of losing documents to natural hazards such as a fire.
Recruitment and retention
Recent data shows that remote working leads to better productivity while making employees happier and lowering operating costs. As more employees continue to appreciate the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of remote work, this trend is poised to become the norm. If your business doesn’t offer sufficient support to remote workers, this could easily result in failing to recruit top talent and losing some of your best employees to competitive offers.
With a cloud-based collaborative platform and subscription to as-needed software packages, you’ll be able to open your doors to remote working or telecommuting for multiple positions. You’ll also reduce overhead with less hardware and office space needed to carry out the same tasks.
While you don’t need to implement drastic changes, especially for an already successful business model, small adjustments and data solutions can begin to have an immediate impact and optimize your operations.
