The point of business technology is to either increase revenue or decrease costs. We advise our customers to debate that point when evaluating technology to see if it is a good fit for their business. If it is not clear how the technology will benefit the business in this manner, think carefully about whether that technology is right for you.
One way in which technology can decrease cost is by improving efficiency. For example, faster computers allow for the faster completion of tasks and less labor time spent on the tasks. This is a common justification for periodic upgrades which is widely accepted. Beyond hardware, we are in an age where automation can make a significant impact on efficiency. Tasks that can happen automatically do not require human interaction and the associated labor costs. If you are a Colden Company customer you are already benefitting from automation and you may not realize it. One standard piece of automation we run is cleaning up of temporary files on workstations. As computers are used to do daily work temporary files build up on your computer. Over time a large number of files can build up causing your computer to have to sift through those large number of files to find what it needs. We use automation to clear out those files to keep our customer’s systems running optimally. We use automation for alerting us to potential problems on your system so we can address before the problem occurs.
In your business, automation can improve business process. The question is how? The answer to that comes from you. You know your business and your business process better than anyone. It pays dividends to examine those processes periodically and do so with automation in mind. What processes could be automated using tools like Microsoft Power Automate to speed up or better organize your business process. Power Automate is a powerful tool that can speed up your business process by automatically routing certain emails with attachments to a SharePoint site as an example. Power Automate has a nice approval process for tasks like invoice approval that automatically route invoices via email with approve or deny buttons inside the email. You can configure text notifications of certain emails if you like as another example. Microsoft has a library of commonly used “flows” as they call them that other businesses are using for automation. Can your business benefit from automation? If you would like to have a discussion about your business process and how tools like Power Automate can help, please give us a call at (888) 600-4560 or email us at info@coldencompany.com and we can schedule a discussion.