How to enhance the productivity of your company saving time and money

A couple of years ago Nuance, an American IT giant with around 14thousand employees, conducted a research entitled Better technology, greater efficiency. It came out from the investigation that one of the main reasons for the inefficiency of SME was the lack or scarce use of solutions of document management and digital archiving. On the contrary, adopting a digitalisation of documents could have resulted in saving time and increasing productivity. Not only in the phase of elaboration and production of documents but also in the finding and sharing of the information one.

Compared to when then research was carried out, most probably things have not changed. Though the analysis tools have been refined. The digital transformation is, indeed, not just about the theme of documentary dematerialisation. For example, an invoice being produced natively on a non-paper format by itself results in a decrease of cut trees (which is a good thing) but it does not automatically coincide with big money savings for the company. Nor does it necessarily coincide with an increase in productivity, this being an actual source of less waste of time and, consequently, of money.

To enhance productivity, find the reasons for unproductivity

We must give credit to the research for raising a crucial issue: the movement of data, within the company as well as outside of it, which is a crucial aspect of its productivity. But it must be added that, before being a strictly technological problem, it is an issue of company culture and organisation. To change which, as reminded by the Japanese method Kaizen, you cannot rely on a system of rules valid for everyone. The “regulatory” approach then often has the disadvantage of being schematic and not very flexible.

So, the first foresight, if you want to enhance productivity, is to find the reasons for unproductivity. Let’s give an example. It is an ascertained data that during the working day so much time is spent sending and reading emails. Actually, a lot of the contents of emails could be shared more quickly in a Digital Hive or through systems of instant messaging, so that both the sender and the receiver would save time.

But how can we decide which contents? To answer this question, it is necessary to focus the attention back to the change in mentality and organisational dimension, that needs to be solicited with file sharing tools but cannot be substituted by just resorting to digital applications.

Training and slim software solutions

Hence, the ideal would be to proceed hand in hand in a work of training support matched with the introduction of software solutions that are slim and suited to the specific situation. In the present landscape, among other things, many of these solutions are suitable also for SME, due to their moderate prices and their modularity. However, the simplification it would introduce in the processes need these prerequisites:

Otherwise even the most technologically advanced platform would risk remaining an empty shell.

It is also obvious that, for the motivational mechanisms cited above to be enabled, is necessary to leverage the involvement of human resources by resorting to business welfare tools and benefits as an integral part of the radical reorganization of the company, in which an increased productivity would also be reflected by an enhanced satisfaction on their part.

BusinessRM uses the Context Oriented Management (C.O.M.) methodology. It allows creating the best conditions for the It allows you to create the best conditions that encourage the involvement of human resources. Discover why.