The ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) tools applied to the business world must inculcate an improvement in the company’s productivity, either directly (reducing production time, saving costs, simplifying processes) or indirectly (motivating employees, improving safety, reducing emissions).
On many occasions, we find that the implementation of new technological solutions supposes the opposite, either due to its complexity, lack of training, or not being the correct tool for the proposed problem.
How Information Technology Tools Have Improved Business Productivity?
The rapid technological advances of the last decades have completely redefined the workspace in companies in all sectors. In particular, there are four fields that have improved considerably with technology and that directly affect the productivity of our employees.
Improvement In Process Efficiency
One of the key factors that technology can affect productivity is by streamlining processes, automating repetitive tasks, or making communication faster, for example, allowing employees to focus on more important tasks.
More Collaboration And Communication
The level of hyper connection that has been achieved today, allows faster and more efficient communication within the company, exponentially improving the capacity for internal collaboration.
Currently, it is possible that within a company with a large number of employees, all of them are connected to each other, regardless of internal hierarchy and can collaborate on projects, share information, etc.
1. Cost Control
With the improvement and simplification of internal processes, there inevitably comes a reduction in costs, but technology also allows us to carry out much more exhaustive control of them at all levels, allowing us to detect problems and act in the areas of the company that are less efficient. Costing and financial management are critical to your business’s survival. Applying for Business Capital Loans online when you face a financial crisis is a great idea but it is only possible when you equip your business with the hardware and software which can help in the time of crisis.
2. Increased Security
Security, at all levels, is a key part of the productivity of companies and technology is essential to avoid what can pose significant threats, not only for productivity but for its continuity.
What ICT Tools Can Improve the Productivity of Your Company?
All areas of the company are susceptible to improvement through the use of technological advances, but when we focus on ICT, these are some of the most sensitive areas:
Data Storage and Management
Information and data have become of paramount importance for the performance of companies in modern society. It depends on them that they are able to evolve and adapt to the rapid changes they need to remain competitive and one of the main reasons for incorporating ICT tools in all areas.
Equally important is having the necessary information, such as making the information available at all times in the most agile and productive way.
In this sense, cloud solutions offer us today all kinds of possibilities, facilitating access to information from any place and device, without compromising security, while reducing costs, since they do not require an initial investment in equipment, storage and physical security systems in the company.
There are many very complex and powerful cloud computing solutions that can allow us to deploy all kinds of services and architectures directly in the cloud.
These are some of the best known:
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
There are also very simple information and communication technology tools that allow us to store files, manage email or manage our schedules. These are some of the best known:
- Dropbox
- G Suite
- One Drive
- iCloud
Project Management
Many companies operate on projects that have multiple employees involved. Therefore, it is interesting to have common spaces for its management that avoid parallel processes that reduce productivity and increase the dedication of each employee.
Any business that wants to better manage their projects and the information of each will have to resort to technological solutions that allow creating projects and assigning members to each.
In this way, each involved party will be able to monitor the project in the common space, add a task, record the time it took to do it or mark it as finished. Similarly, all kinds of functions that in many cases the company itself can customize to make it a customized solution.
There are tools for project management of all kinds and complexity, from simple task managers to very powerful management platforms designed for large projects with very large work teams. Therefore, we will have to study very well which one best suits our needs and try several before deciding on anyone. These are some of the most popular:
Basecamp
Basecamp is one of the pioneering platforms in the project management sector, and it is also one of the most used and robust, with more functionality and integrations, but also one of the most complex.
It allows very detailed management of multiple projects, work teams and access permissions to information according to the profile of each user.
Some more project management software are:
- Teamwork
- Asana
- Evernote
- GanttProject
- Trello
Customer Relationship Management
Business software can be an unbeatable technological solution for our employees to reduce search, management and monitoring times. Solutions such as CRM have allowed many SMEs to keep a comprehensive record of the movements made with all real or potential customers, and at the same time share all that information among employees.
Thus, although we sometimes see this type of management software to be useful for accounting or administration departments, the reality is that it can improve the productivity of other professional profiles such as Project Managers or Account Managers, who need to know what state they are in. The relationship with a customer or enter records about them.
Companies that use software solutions, such as CRM, to analyze customer information for marketing purposes.
Some of the most popular:
- Sage CRM
- Salesforce
- Zoho
- Sugar CRM
- Sum CRM
Communication
The type of communication channel used for employees to communicate is also decisive in their productivity.
Emails have become the main daily instrument for the communication of many companies, but they are not always the fastest and most productive way. Occasionally, a conversation that could have been resolved in 1 minute of a phone call or instant messaging takes several emails to send, multiplying the time allocated.
For all this, it is important to know what type of messages or communications there are between employees and which channel is the most appropriate in each case.
The most traditional solutions are email and telephone (either landline or mobile), but there are other technologies such as VOIP, Instant messaging, chats, video conferences which, in addition to being more efficient, are generally cheaper.
The use of video calls with colleagues who travel to see clients in other cities or colleagues who work remotely is a good example. A video call allows us, for example, to have several people in the same room to talk to another person who is in another place. We can make calls to several bands to start a conversation between several professionals located in different spaces. Here, the solutions are also varied and we find popular tools such as Skype, in its free or paid version, among others.
Conclusion
It is essential to analyze in advance that in which areas we want to improve and through which technological solutions we can achieve this objective without technology being a new problem instead of a solution, and implementing solutions that are used to follow technological trends.