Small and Medium Enterprises while on one hand look towards scaling up and rising fast, they also on the other, look at reducing operational costs. While this happens, one of the crucial most objects to look at is business efficiency. Many a times, while small enterprises are focused on getting the maximum out of their available resources, they employ resources in a manner which actually, in the longer run does not adds onto the bottom-line and also exhausts critical resources such as 'manpower'.
The Almost - Catch22
Small and Medium enterprises many a times fall in this catch of: increasing manpower to sufficiate business requirements, while at the same time, maintaining costs and reducing overheads. But while recruiting and scaling up in terms of manpower, SMEs tend to over-look the basic processes on which the work being done by the team can be modeled and automated.
Eg: Managing payroll: while you are an emerging company you can, instead of hiring an actual HR team, employ technology such as a SaaS based ERP product, which allows you to easily handle and manage payroll. Obviously as you scale up, you can always look into scaling up automation accordingly or increasing the human intervention.
Reduce Human Intervention: Employ Technology
At IndiaMart we have always been proponents of the smart use of available technology for our partner SMEs. We have been proactive in telling our partner SMEs of how they can leverage emerging technology, to improve their business.
Here we list down some simple steps to ensure that your emerging business increases efficiency while maintaining and adding to the healthy bottomline!
The Almost - Catch22
Small and Medium enterprises many a times fall in this catch of: increasing manpower to sufficiate business requirements, while at the same time, maintaining costs and reducing overheads. But while recruiting and scaling up in terms of manpower, SMEs tend to over-look the basic processes on which the work being done by the team can be modeled and automated.
Eg: Managing payroll: while you are an emerging company you can, instead of hiring an actual HR team, employ technology such as a SaaS based ERP product, which allows you to easily handle and manage payroll. Obviously as you scale up, you can always look into scaling up automation accordingly or increasing the human intervention.
Reduce Human Intervention: Employ Technology
At IndiaMart we have always been proponents of the smart use of available technology for our partner SMEs. We have been proactive in telling our partner SMEs of how they can leverage emerging technology, to improve their business.
Here we list down some simple steps to ensure that your emerging business increases efficiency while maintaining and adding to the healthy bottomline!
- Hiring
Instead of really outsourcing your hiring to a recruitment consultant (till the time you need someone very senior in the industry, which happens generally through connects), leverage freely available and powerful professional networks like: LinkedIn
Source: http://www.infitech.net/images/img_page_content/small-business-it-consulting.jpg
- Customer Management
Use pay per usage/ pay as you go models, benefit from the cloud while using fantastic CRM tools available in the market. Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce and Sage are leaders in the domain. Such smart technology can help you reduce cost of customer management drastically in the longer run by establishing a strong customer management process within the company.
- Sales
Use mobile apps to ensure that your sales team has information available to them always on the move. Empower your sales team with these simple and easy to use mobile apps which ensure easy access to crucial information round the clock. This also helps you as an organisation chart out the productivity of the sales team and really look at the return on investment.
- Innovation: go paperless
Even in times today, we still see many SMEs working the same way of managing loads of paper sheets, files and bundles. You can actually reduce cost by going "almost paperless" because practically realizing, paper will still be needed, but going almost paperless, still will sure save you a good buck. But how? Use mobile and the internet to collaborate/ Emails to communicate.
There are new tools like groupsite which allow you to create an Internal "private" collaborative knowledge management driven, social network within your organization.
Blog authored by: IndiaMart Knowledge Services.
To know more how you can leverage technology for your business drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will be happy to help!
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