Miles IT currently serves thousands of active customers. We are busier than ever helping our clients leverage technology to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of economic change and uncertainty.
Over the past few years, we have found there is a subset of businesses that succeed despite the market conditions or industry challenges. While many other businesses are contracting and struggling, these winners seem to adapt faster, better, and more successfully than those around them. To better understand what these winners do differently, we examined the types of technology projects that they undertake.
This article provides an overview of the most common projects and initiatives that these winning businesses have been pursuing.
Efficiency and Productivity
Reduced margins combined with a sparse workforce means many businesses are heavily focused on leveraging technology to increase the productivity and efficiency of their staff. These projects save time and effort while maintaining maximum output and quality results.
- Business Process Automation: Many businesses are suffering from death by 1000 cuts. When business is good, the small inefficiencies are “unimportant” or “just part of doing business”. Yet, when margins tighten and customer pressures increase, winners carefully examine their business processes and productivity. The wasted productivity from the sum of all the inefficient processes adds up to big dollars. Tactics winners use to find and address these issues range from inefficiency scavenger hunts to detailed use-case-based automation roadmaps. One commonality is that Business Process Automation and Workflow Automation solutions are becoming more mainstream, easier to implement, and a preferred way for winning businesses to obtain a rapid Return on Investment (ROI) once these process inefficiencies are identified.
- Connecting and Consolidating Systems: With the rise of business process and workflow automation efforts, many organizations have realized that using many disparate systems results in a high level of inefficiency. For some organizations, different teams were using different software solutions, and spreadsheets and manual processes filled the gaps in between. There was an astounding amount of time and productivity lost to redundant and labor-intensive processes, like re-keying data, generating reports, and communicating and addressing issues. These inefficiencies all derived from a lack of clear and real-time shared business information. With the recognition of these obstacles, there has been an increase in initiatives to connect, integrate, and consolidate software systems.
Solutions that Drive Revenue
As our customers’ economic landscapes evolve, many face new challenges in acquiring customers and building revenue streams with their existing customers through the traditional products or services they provided.
- Digital Product & Service Delivery Platforms: An increasing trend we see from winning businesses is the ability to branch out from traditional product and service offerings to create digital service delivery platforms. One common approach is for businesses to use their specific industry knowledge to create digital platforms that reach new potential customer segments. The benefits of this approach are that digital platforms may be more accessible, typically require less ongoing overhead, and allow for recurring, subscription-based revenue streams. Digital disruption is no longer well-funded start-ups taking on giants. We see more and more businesses branching out to create digital platforms in the nooks and crannies of industries while growing their customer base and market share.
- Marketing Automation: When times get difficult, you can either curl up in a ball and hide or you can push your business even harder. This sentiment has helped many businesses succeed so that they invest more in marketing and sales instead of cutting back when new customer acquisition becomes difficult.
However, we find that most winning companies are not just pushing harder, but are pushing smarter too! By capturing and leveraging data about customers at various points in their journey, winners have increased sales by providing improved targeted messaging, personalized offers, and timely communications through marketing automation initiatives.
Risk and Cost Reduction
Winning organizations recognize that it is always important to remain diligent regarding the mitigation of major business risks. Don’t leave success up to chance! This concept constitutes our last category of winning projects.
- Security Initiatives: Risks related to security are at an all-time high for small and mid-sized businesses. Winning companies are training staff on the dangers of scams & phishing attacks, shoring up security defenses, performing network and application security monitoring, and quickly remediating any potential vulnerabilities. Successful businesses recognize the importance of preventing major security events. They understand the hard costs and the impacts on productivity and the organization’s reputation should an incident occur
- Cost Reduction Projects: We find that winning businesses continue to focus on maintaining lean, simple, and up-to-date technologies to support their operations. Projects that simplify technology and reduce expenses and direct labor costs are also in high demand. Various types of projects, ranging from cloud migrations to system & vendor consolidation, have successfully reduced bottom-line costs.
Conclusion
Now more than ever, it is vital to be on the front lines of technology to stay competitive through a changing and challenging economic landscape. Winners are demonstrating the ability to be agile and adapt quickly in the face of these shifts. Taking advantage of modern technology opportunities has been a major factor in helping winning businesses succeed and thrive now and into the future.
