The goal of most firms is to operate at the greatest efficiency levels – to output the best product or service with the least financial outlay. However, finding ways to improve your company’s efficiency can often seem a daunting prospect.
Whether you’re just starting out and have yet to find your feet or you’ve been in operation for many years and have perhaps become slightly stuck in your ways, it’s often difficult to step back and take an impartial overview of your firm’s current processes.
If you keep thinking there are ways that you could streamline your company’s operations but aren’t quite sure where to start, below are five tried-and-tested methods you could use to cut overheads while improving the overall efficiency of your company’s processes.
Outsource and employ freelancers
In recent years there has been an explosion in the freelancing sector due, largely, to improved technology and better connection speeds. These days, there’s very little reason for your employees to all work under the same roof in the same confined office space.
Extending this idea, a little further, it’s easy to see why hiring freelancers to work on projects during your busier moments makes perfect sense. No business stands still and some periods will inevitably be busier than others. By taking an ad hoc approach to your employment commitments, you’ll be able to hire a virtual workforce, ready to fill in during the busier moments but without the headache and responsibilities of looking after (and paying) full-time employees.
Move your digital services to the cloud
Moving your firm’s IT services to the cloud doesn’t just make sense from a logistics point of view – it will also save your company considerable money. Rather than shelling out for the costs of hardware and maintenance (and potentially employing an entire IT department), you’ll be able to offload these considerable costs to a third party. So long as you have someone on the ground that is suitably educated with the knowledge gained from a cloud enablement program to at least oversee your network, you could pass your entire IT services to a specialist provider.
Meet less, do more
In a recent survey, 41% of employees stated meetings as being the biggest time drain on their day. It’s estimated the average worker attends 62 meetings per month, often with little benefit. Take a second before calling a meeting and ask yourself if it’s really necessary. More often than not, most of the things you want to discuss could have been handled as well (if not better) by email or a quick video call.
Buy in bulk
The majority of suppliers will be open to the idea of giving a coupon from https://ShipTheDeal.com or discount if you buy more, all at once. Rather than taking a haphazard approach to your supplies (whether it be office goods or manufacturing products), try to think longer-term and buy in bulk, in advance.
Automate, automate, automate
The sophistication of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computers have advanced exponentially in recent years to the point it’s now possible to pass many of your more mundane, repetitive tasks to autonomous machines.
Consider integrating automation into your procedures to look after everything from accounts and payroll to customer care and social marketing.
