Using Technology To Help Grow Your Business

In today’s changing economy business’s, now more than ever, have to adapt and change in order to grow and excel. As the economy makes yet another shift and business, especially in Michigan, continue to suffer, and business owners are now faced with a new task, how to keep the mistakes from the past from happening again. The solution is in technology. With staff reductions and growing demand for better service there is a growing gap in productivity and quality of service. Using the right technology can close the gap and increase productivity, and quality of service.

The first hurdle is to choose the right technology for the business. With the wide variety of software and hardware it is better to get help in picking the technology. There are a number of consulting companies whose sole purpose is to keep up to date on the latest technology. There are companies out there that will make you decide what you want, and make it work, but this may not be the right answer for you. When looking for a company it is best to pick a company that uses a combination of IT and business skills. This will help in ensuring that the technology you pick is the right technology for your business. As a business owner one needs to look for a company that not only understands the need for technology, but has an understanding of how business processes can be wrapped around the technology. By using the technology that is built around a business’s process, can improve efficiency by 100 fold. For example a company trying to become ISO certified can use document management software to organize and document the company’s process. By using an easily accessible document management software wrapped around a company goal to become ISO certified can save time. Just picking the right technology is only half of the battle. The other half of the battle is maintaining the technology.

Picking the right technology that will improve your business process, whether it is by a document management system, a CRM system, an ERP system etc.. a company must also allocate resources to maintain and back up the system. This can be costly for a company to maintain an IT department. So the option is to outsource the IT work. By outsourcing your IT needs you save time and money. The amount of time a typical IT department spends waiting for something to break, plus the amount of money that a company pays an IT department can be minimized. By outsourcing an IT department you get the same level of service for a fraction of the cost. The level of service continues, as breakdowns are handled quickly and effectively, plus the reporting that most IT companies will provide reporting to a company. Having a company that will understand not only IT but business will be an added bonus that will be a better asset to any company. In the end the business gets to cut cost of employing an entire IT company and gets a better service. That is a winning combination.