Understanding the core and critical components of your business is the first step you need to take to operate your business efficiently. If you know and understand your business components, then you can come up with a sound plan on how you can have every process in your system integrate with each other for improved productivity.
If your company is heavily dependent on technology, then chances are applications play a huge role in your business. These also needs to be aligned to each other.
Understanding your core components
Identifying the core component of your company widely varies depending on your business type and industry, but ultimately it boils down to 3 things – operations, management, and documentation.
- Operations include your machines and equipment, technology, and operating systems. Different processes, marketing and sales strategies, and workplace protocols also fall under operations. In general, this refers to everything in your business that is needed to make it work.
- Management covers people and the systems that they use to run your operations. This is not just limited to your staff per se, it also covers other things like workload, communication procedures, location and even payroll.
- Documentation consists of all the operational paperwork in your business. This includes all internal communication such as e-mails and memorandums, monthly statements, and reports. Bookkeeping and other financial transactions also fall under documentation.
Once you’ve mapped out your processes and systems, it would be easier to identify which component in your business work flow are doing well and which ones need some tweaking. From there, it would be easier to find the correct applications that could help improve your business.
Choosing the right applications
If you’re already using a number of applications in your business, the next best step would be to find ways to strengthen them reviewing complementing functions. However, if you want to ensure value for your money and longevity there is merit in looking to consolidate your applications rather then finding something else to fill a gap.
One example is Microsoft’s Office 365 bundle, which is currently one of the best platforms to use since it incorporates with the 3 core components of businesses. Using Microsoft devices and OS will serve as the foundation of your operational systems. For management, there is SharePoint which you can use for data sharing, streamlined communication, and easy collaboration with your teams. If you have employees working remotely, SharePoint will also allow you to easily monitor their progress and access their works. Meanwhile, MS Office and OneDrive falls under documentation. All of your reports can be done on either apps and properly stored while still maintaining security and confidentiality.
The Suite then easily scales out to include things like Data Analytics and CRM.
Crossover
Due to the various apps in the market, it is inevitable that you’ll have applications in that portfolio that will have a lot of crossover. Even with structured bundles such as Office 365, you will still notice that the apps are overlapping with each other.
While they essentially have different functions, SharePoint and OneDrive can both be used as a content management system. In addition to that, both apps also have MS Office features.
The secret in knowing which app to keep is identifying what is heavily used in your business workflow. Keep an eye of the functions that need to happen seamlessly and choose the app that best perform that.
