Tip of the Week: What if We Told You That You Can Improve Productivity AND Save Money?

For a business to prosper, there has to be more than a casual consideration of the expense report. Most businesses do their budget yearly, but some smaller organizations have gone to a three-month (or quarterly) budget to improve their ability to be more agile with their capital. There are times, however, where no matter what you seem to do, expenses outfox profits and your company has to take a hard look at what they are going to do to right the ship.

The first thing a company that’s losing money regularly has to establish is “why?” This starts with a full-scale assessment of core operational expenses and the returns that you’re getting on those individual investments. In regards to the financial outlay for your organization’s implementation of technology systems, these often carry substantial capital investments. By expecting immediate returns on these IT expenses, you may be putting yourself in an unfavorable position going forward.

Here are three IT solutions that will improve your business’s productivity, while limiting the large capital expenses that can hamstring your business’ ability to turn profits.

Managed IT Services/Co-Managed IT
IT professionals are extraordinarily confident in one variable of technology: it’s propensity to malfunction. Every piece of technology, from servers to a mouse, will eventually fail. When your technology fails, your business is overcome with profit-sapping downtime and often faces non-budgetable expenses. To mitigate these redundant problems, many small and mid-sized businesses have begun outsourcing their IT management and support to managed service providers like Horne & Benik. Managed IT services provide organizations several extremely useful services that are billed as one, easy to budget, monthly charge. Some of the solutions a managed service contract can deliver include:

• Remote hardware monitoring and management
• Network security
• Help desk support
• Data backup and recovery
• Vendor management
• Business technology reviews and consulting

By outsourcing your organization’s IT support, you avoid large capital costs and have access to technicians that handle IT issues every day. By switching to managed IT, you’re assured to have a professional handling of the integrity of your organization’s IT, and the peace of mind you need to forge ahead confidently.

Cloud Computing
Full-scale cloud computing solutions may be new to your business, but some of the top companies on the planet have been utilizing hosted computing solutions for some time, and for good reason. Essentially, what cloud computing does best is take the overhead associated with purchasing, managing, and maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure, and turns it into predictable and regular expenses that you can budget around.

For example, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to pony up money to repair a server hosting your data if it experiences an unforeseen issue? Additionally, the benefits of cloud computing are seen in terms of productivity by giving your staff anytime and anywhere access to corporate data. Therefore, the cloud is a sure-fire way to improve operational efficiency while lowering the capital cost of doing business.

Voice Over Internet Protocol
A third IT technology that you will want to implement in order maximize your budget and productivity is VoIP. With VoIP, you will save a significant amount of expense by eliminating your long distance phone bills, and VoIP comes standard with a ton of communication features that you’re likely paying extra for if your business is still plugged into a traditional phone service. Additionally, you can have your VoIP solution hosted for you so that you don’t have to manage it, which again, will save you both time and money.

Horne & Benik can set up your business with all three of these money-saving IT solutions. Contact us at (603) 499-4400 to find out how you can do more with your technology, AND save money. When you think about it, isn’t that the entire point of business technology?