In our economy, speed is critical to business success. The fast get results first and transform the market place. Technology drives the pace and the strategy. Here are ten ways technology can help your business drive efficiency and improve productivity.
1. Double Your Display Real Estate
Today’s computers are built to handle the demands of switching from one application to another in rapid session. Unfortunately, it’s often the display of all those open windows that holds productivity back. A cost effective solution is to add a second display—to boost productivity and stop the switching back and forth between applications.
2. Get on the Same Page
We’ve all seen movies or TV shows where the editorial staff of a newspaper holds a short daily meeting to set goals and direction for the day’s work. This concept works well in other businesses too. Keep it brief, focused on making decisions and sharing factors that could create bottlenecks, like short staff, late deliveries, change updates, etc. Use technology to include those in remote locations.
3. Offload Support Operations
Businesses continue to outsource their support services, to focus their internal resources on their core competencies. If you run multiple printing devices, consider the advantages of a technology-driven print service provider that maximizes resource utilization and provides recurring cost savings.
4. Share the Process
Even routine processes and activities merit a strategic approach that leverages best practices. Document your standard operating procedures so others will benefit from the efficiencies learned over time and experience. Make them available as a central resource, accessible from any desktop on your local network.
5. Curb the Clutter
Personal style and preference are one thing, but teams collaborate more efficiently when shared resources and information are organized and archived in easy-to-use, logical structure. Schedule periodic “organization days” to clean-up, archive, discard and consolidate records of completed business. Shred, recycle or trade-in duplicate, discarded or obsolete materials and equipment whenever possible.
6. Go Paperless
Convert hard copy documents to digital records and archive them on a server accessible from the desktop. Digital documents can be located and retrieved faster than their paper equivalents. Plus, document management software includes version control, access tracking and other features to vastly improve collaboration.
7. Recycle and Reuse
Why reinvent the basics? Spend your development time on content, not design. Set up or use existing templates—as-is or adjusted for your requirements—to format your memos, emails, presentations, announcements, etc. Templates save incremental time every time you use them.
8. Retool Your Tool Kit
Today, there’s an app for almost anything you want to track, monitor, convert or schedule. There are also improved productivity tools in nearly every software update. Leverage this new technology to help you remember and track your action items. Innovations like cloud-computing make it easy to stay in sync between multiple devices and locations.
9. Cut the Cord
Like the migration of land lines to mobile phones, the trend in computing has moved from wired to wireless networks. WiFi-connected laptops, tablets and smartphones are free to move from office to meeting (or meetings) seamlessly online. A wireless network also makes it easier to reposition peripherals and saves expense when remodeling the office.
Now, your printer or MFP can also be ‘wireless’ too.There are incredible apps and solutions to connect mobile workers to their office and co-workers, no matter where they are in the world. One example is Xerox’s print management and mobility service – an affordable cloud print management solution that brings you Print Anywhere mobile printing with benchmark security. With Xerox® Print Anywhere, you can print from nearly any email-enabled mobile device, on any network and cell network, and you can print to any brand of printer to support your entire fleet.
Another example is the Xerox Mobile Link App – which allows you to scan, email, fax, and print from your phone or tablet by connecting with Xerox multifunction printers. You are also able to send data to cloud storage.
10. Explore the Possibilities
Cloud-based storage, backup and content management services are growing. Their economies of scale and support are becoming more attractive than maintaining these services internally.
