How to Use Technology Effectively for Business Growth
If your business is in an early stage, you need not buy any packaged software from the market.
By Rakesh Raman
If your business is going one step forward, two steps back, you may not be using technology in the right way. There are chances that your business does not need technology at all at this stage.
Here are a few steps that you can take to deploy or discard tech solutions depending on the condition of your business.
Manual Processes
If your business is in an early stage, you need not buy any packaged software from the market. Initially, you should be able to use software applications – such as office applications – which are available free of charge on the web.
Your immediate focus should be to create your manual processes. If they are running properly without using a computer, then you can plan to automate those processes.
Enterprise Applications
You should begin by using a tailor-made enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for various applications such as financial accounting, inventory management, sales, marketing, customer engagement, and others.
If you are not comfortable with the integrated software for all these applications, you can begin with financial accounting only and later integrate it with other applications in your business.
Pathway Proposal: The Pathway platform offers technology and marketing services to small businesses as well as ad agencies and public relations (PR) companies. You can click here to download and study the proposal.
Documentation
Make engaging digital documents for all your business processes. These documents will include text, photographs, and diagrams that will help your employees easily understand and follow that process. You can even upload these documents on the web for restricted use by your employees.
Business Website
It is essential to have a website for your business. However, if you are not in a position to update your site regularly, you need not create it. Remember, it is better to work without a website instead of having a stale website.
Communications
It is mostly seen that small and medium businesses do not possess the right communication skills to interact internally with the employees or with external buyers and suppliers. If this is the case, it is advisable to hire expert services to get standard communications made. Then you can make minor changes in them to customize them for the recipients.
These are some of the steps that you can use immediately to streamline your business processes.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation. He has been running the global technology news site RMN Digital for the past 12 years. Earlier, he was writing an exclusive edit-page tech business column (named Technophile) regularly for The Financial Express, which is a daily business newspaper of The Indian Express Group.
He had also been associated with the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) as a digital media expert to help businesses use technology for brand marketing and business development. You can click here to know more about him and his work.
