Tip of the Week: Why Optimization Is Key to Your Success

The business world is inherently somewhat Darwinian: instead of organisms with desirable traits surviving and carrying on, better businesses tend to outlast those that are inferior. In order to keep on, you need to ensure that your business has the tools it needs to be better than the alternative. Part of this is a great staff, yes, but for today’s tip, we’ll discuss how optimizing your technology can help.

What Does Optimization Require?
Optimization of your operations is key to remain successful in an increasingly competitive market. This optimization will require you to do three things:

• Identify, understand, and accept the way to optimize your business.
• Change your focus to meet the demands of your market and clients.
• Give your employees the power and tools to succeed.

These three requirements may sound fairly vague, but there are plenty of ways that you can adjust your business to embrace them.

Practically Using Business Optimization Practices
To better understand the three requirements of optimization, it may help to review a few real-life scenarios in which these optimization practices would appear.

Identify, understand, and accept the way to optimize your business.
The first key to optimizing your business is to understand what about it can be improved. Through careful analysis of your processes, you will be able to identify where your inefficiencies lie. From there, you can identify whether something is necessary to your business, or is ultimately just wasting time and resources. Then you can determine if an improvement can be made, or if it should just be abandoned. With this knowledge, you can trim the fat from your processes and boost their efficiency.

For example, perhaps there is a member of your business who needs to approve projects at every stage before progress can continue, but this member is exceptionally busy and therefore can’t always review things efficiently. This would most likely hold back your progress. Understanding this could lead to a reexamination of your process, and the determination that approval may not be necessary beyond the initial implementation of a project and the final confirmation to put it into action, saving everyone involved some time and stress.

Changing focus to meet the demands of your market and clients.
While you may view your business as the culmination of a personal goal and the means to put food on the table, your audience is going to have a much different impression. The way they see it, you’re there to provide them with what they need, whether that’s a particular product or service. Since your business can’t really exist without them, their priorities will have to come first.

Automation provides a few simple methods of ensuring that you know what those priorities are, and that your audience finds your business effective at fulfilling them. This is especially true where issue reporting is concerned. Let’s face it, while the first report is useful, the rest quickly become a distraction as the issue is resolved - plus, you have to acknowledge that the report was received. The right IT can help you optimize this process as much as possible by handling these responses through automation, letting you better spend your time solving the problem.

Give your employees the power and tools to succeed.
Want to know the biggest flaw that the members of your workforce all share, including you? You’re all human beings, which makes you inherently flawed and prone to mistakes. The right technology solutions can help to make sure that your entire team is managed properly, given a comprehensive schedule to keep each of them on track and their processes standardized.

These solutions can have the added benefit of providing you with the data needed to further optimize your workflows, boosting productivity, and reducing the stress put on your employees.

Are you ready to optimize your IT? Give Horne & Benik a call at (603) 499-4400, and keep coming to our blog for more handy tips and content.