How to leverage the success of your business
When it comes to making your business successful, you always need to keep your vision in sight, because a big vision will take your business a long way. Moreover, your compelling vision should be built on a realistic business plan, fueled with perseverance and leveraged with software and tech advances to stay ahead of your competition.
As you upgrade your business over time, it’s always a good idea to ask yourself what technology you've been slow to adopt. Although your choice of tech will depend on the nature of your business, here are four areas of your business that might be useful to upgrade:
1. Enhance your relationships with your suppliers
Supplier relationship management (SRM) is a term that refers to two things: one, a business discipline to develop relevant strategies for interaction with third-party suppliers; and two, software to streamline the information flow in supply chain management. As a business practice, it helps you enhance your interactions with vendors that supply your company’s goods or services through strategic planning. As software, it serves as an important component in supply chain management, increasing the efficiency with which you purchase products and services; manage your inventories; and process materials.
By implementing the best practices of SRM and using robust software to enhance your relationship with every supplier, your business will be able to cut its costs, increase its overall efficiency and build mutually beneficial relationships. In short, SRM will help you make better decisions when it comes to handling all of your business supplies.
2. Manage your projects more efficiently
As a discipline, project management makes it easier to initiate projects, plan them in detail, execute on ideas, guide the efforts of a team and control talent and outcomes as it strives to meet success landmarks and achieve specific goals.
The use of project management software facilitates plans, schedules and the allocation of resources. It’s useful for improving collaboration, controlling costs, managing budgets, monitoring quality and sharing and generating documents. Without the software, using only paper-based planning, it’s much more challenging to clearly communicate with suppliers and clients, make the best decisions or provide a high level of customer satisfaction.
3. Improve your long-distance meetings
While business travel, of course, still exists, it’s now optional rather than necessary. It’s possible for two or more people to hold a long-distance meeting that provides similar benefits to meeting in person through video conferencing.
In its simplest form, it can be like a telephone conversation that's enhanced with the transmission of graphics and text; and in its most sophisticated version, it can be a high-quality audio-video transmission between two or more locations. If you want to set up your own video conference, each site needs a codec to convert video and audio signals, encode them and send them over an IP connection. In addition, each site needs to have a camera, a monitor, a microphone and a speaker.
Video conferencing offers many tangible benefits. It can save on travel costs; can be used for all sorts of small meetings, such as a dialog between business partners, suppliers, or customers; and can be useful for large meetings, perhaps between the executive staff of two companies, or between a staff trainer and employees.
4. Advance your tech infrastructure
Cloud computing has leveled the playing field between small and large companies. Instead of investing in the high cost of setting up local servers and networks, your small business can subscribe to a network of remote servers to process, store and manage its data. Cloud services also make it possible for you to use the SaaS business model to get access to high-end software, letting skilled IT professionals take care of installations, updates and repairs.
By migrating your business to the cloud, you'll reduce the cost of managing and maintaining an on-premise computer infrastructure, and you'll benefit from scalability, business continuity and enhanced collaboration. So if your business is seasonal, you can reduce or increase how much bandwidth it needs; if your business office or facility is destroyed by a natural disaster, all of your data will still be safe; and if your business collaborates with freelancers, they can access your online business resources from anywhere in the world.
In summary, you can get closer to manifesting your business vision by leveraging the power of technology to enhance your relationship with suppliers, manage your projects more efficiently, improve your long-distance communications and advance your technological infrastructure.