Enterprises achieve success through the products and services they provide but underpinning these are a range of operational tasks and processes. When these are inefficient, they take management time and attention away from the core business.
Business owners regularly find their time is eaten up performing manual tasks involved in such things as managing incoming and outgoing mail, reconciling data and dealing with invoicing.
Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to this because they have a smaller workforce and fewer specialist departments. Owners and managers often ‘wear many hats’, taking on a range of roles to keep the business running smoothly.
Time to focus on core business
More efficient processes can alleviate time pressures and unlock business potential by re-focusing attention and expertise back to where it’s most needed - serving customers and growing the business.
Manual, standalone processes can be time-consuming and error-prone. What’s more, they are notoriously difficult to scale, so bottlenecks develop in busy periods and as enterprises expand. This can result in missed targets and unnecessary restrictions on growth.
Consider the manual preparation of outgoing mail. It includes several time-consuming tasks: folding documents to go into envelopes, weighing mail and applying postage and going to the Post Office.
Tasks further up in the process can also be improved, such as data management and the preparation of communications, particularly if separate processes exist for different types of communications (billing, marketing, sales etc.) and format (e.g. physical mail/email).
Automate and digitise to unlock potential
Output management software centralises communications for consistency, convenience and efficiency, while automating mail preparation tasks can reduce time and costs.
With the right equipment and software, companies can streamline a range of business processes including information handling and communications management to:
- Increase productivity by automating tasks, such as those involved in mail preparation and data validation
- Improve accuracy by minimising manual and paper-based processes that can result in mislaid or lost documents and mistakes in data
- Increase customer satisfaction by giving customers choice over how they receive communications, such as by post or email, and by improving communications consistency
- Reduce costs by combining multiple mailings to the same customer and sending emails with attachments instead of letters where customers prefer this
- Minimise physical storage space and cost through digital documents and records, available to all authorised users whenever and wherever they need them.
Most small businesses can unlock potential through process improvements that help them manage time and costs and meet rising customer expectations while equipping them to be agile enough to adapt to changing demands.