Published on May 5th, 2018 | by Sunit Nandi
0How Technology Can Increase Your Company’s Productivity
Productivity is key to a company’s success. There are numerous ways in which you can employ technology to increase productivity in your company. Technology has had a monumental impact on the way things are done in the business world.
Technology can be adopted by a business to create a more productive workforce that is not only efficient but also innovative. Recent advancements in technology such as ‘the cloud’ have led to remote working. Remote working is now possible because data can be accessed from any location at any time.
As a business, in order to increase your competitiveness, you need to identify problems. After identifying problems that you face, then you’ll need to look for technological solutions that can cost-effectively address these challenges. Here are ways in which today’s technology can help increase your company’s productivity:
Connecting work teams
Using technology, you can create common portals where employees working on a similar project can work together and share ideas as well as files. More businesses today are giving their employees the option of working off-site.
This may be because of increasing staff numbers and the large overhead costs that are required to maintain large working spaces. There are many applications that can help you achieve this, for example, slack and Google’s G-Suite.
Employees are able to share documents, communicate and meet online from various locations. There are also other applications that allow for other forms of communication such as instant messaging, phone calls, video chatting, as well as high quality streaming platforms which organize and facilitate data for all users across a company
This technology has allowed business owners to employ highly qualified candidates for jobs regardless of their location.
Faster and easier communication
Businesses owners can now easily communicate their company’s strategies and goals to their employees. Using technology, the employee’s data and track record on their performance are centrally stored in the company’s database where it can be easily accessed by the manager.
After assessing each employee’s performance, the managers can then create measurable and achievable goals. This is because if a goal can’t be quantified then it’s not measurable. These goals should support the business productivity.
The goals can then be communicated to the employees. Technology allows for a more organized communication to take place enabling the employees to visualize the goals and get to see the bigger picture.
The use of cloud communication helps the employees simultaneously work on a single project that has been made available to them using a cloud service. This increases their engagement levels resulting in a more productive workforce.
Performance analysis tools
Technology allows a business to gather information on each employee’s performance levels, therefore, enabling performance evaluation.
Performance evaluation link text is the process of determining how a person’s job-related actions and outcomes add value to the business with respect to the job assigned. Its goal is to get an estimate of the wealth added to the firm by the employee.
Technology will enable a business to generate reports for a deep understanding of each employees performance. It also allows you to monitor other aspects affecting your business performance for example customer preferences and the trends.
After studying these reports, an analysis of the overall business performance is done and the information is used in decision making.
Keeping track of business progress
Technology provides software solutions that managers can use to easily track progress made on achieving business goals. All employees need to have an understanding of how substantial each of their individual contributions made to the business is.
There are a number of software packages that can track the number of tasks that have been successfully completed and the variance between the time taken to accomplish the task with the time allocated.
Using technology you will be able to calculate the costs of materials and compare it with the estimated budget allocations. This will enable a business to put in place corrective measures to ensure the project is done profitably.
At the end of each period, you will get information about:
- Time spent doing a particular task
- Tasks completed successfully
- Materials used
- Issues encountered while performing the project
- Pictures of the progress made.
This will greatly help in reducing time wasted and make work hours more productive. Tools such as Geeckoboard and Salesforce will help you have an insight on how effective your company is in achieving its goals.
Maintaining stock levels
Using technology, managing stock levels becomes an easy task. You can use an inventory management system that will help you have an insight on:
- Sales volumes: the quantity of stock you are selling
- Sales velocity: how quickly you are selling your stock
- Peak times: time of the year that has the highest number of sales.
An inventory management system will reduce time wasted on lead times by shortening the process. This is because it has an automated reordering feature that ensures a business never runs out of valuable stock.
An inventory management system also updates customers on their goods ordered and the shipment process. It can also differentiate the types of inventory for example work in progress (WIP) from raw materials and finished products. This helps in reducing errors made by providing accurate information on goods thus improving productivity.
Technology can improve a business’ productivity in many ways. This is because technology makes it easier work together by enabling collaboration between partners, employees, and businesses. Using technology to boost your productivity is a bold step towards profitability and being competitive.