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Making full use of your IT investment
Information technology in general, and personal computers in particular, have become an all pervasive and very important component of the modern business, be it large, medium or small in size.
The capital value of the technology has reduced, while the scope of things in your business which are controlled or contributed to by this technology has increased. Now, it is not so much the cost of technology we should be concentrating on, but rather the value of the tasks which it can perform and the return on investment achieved.
Much of the value of new IT is derived through a saving in time. Tighter deadlines are the normal expectation of clients and customers who have nearly instant communications and more powerful systems. The effect of their better in-house productivity achievements are then, very readily, visited on us all.
Some Thoughts
Most businesses have, in their IT arsenal, more power and flexibility than they can possibly harness, at least on their own. Allow me to provide an example or two.
An accounting package I know quite well uses MS Office as its principle printing medium. When an invoice is ready to print, Word opens and the print option is selected. Hey presto!
This is important because it means the users of this package, with a little help, can have the invoice in virtually any format or formats they want.
As second example to closer integration is an e-mail attachment or facsimile document concatenator which takes almost anything you can print and packages one or a number of documents in a variety of files and attaches it to your default e-mail product or desktop fax application ready for you to address and send.
There are many examples of software written to simplify work by integrating the benefits of one application with the benefits of another. These save time and money, and often significant risk. Where data must be entered more than once, more than one opportunity to make a mistake exists.
A Scenario
Most commercial entities have customers’ or clients’ information held within their computer systems. In most circumstances, this information is duplicated in most, if not all of the following repositories: the accounting system, a customer relationship management application, the e-mail address books, spreadsheets, merge files, lists relating to specific events or requirements, telephone contact lists and many other places as well.
The client moves offices, as we just have. How do you ensure that all iterations of the client’s details are updated? It is virtually impossible.
A Possible Solution
Think about you own collection of duplicated data. Estimate the time it takes to create and maintain the second and subsequent versions of the data and place a cost on it.
Contemplate how many times data is reentered within your business for differing reasons, and just how much time could be saved by centralising this task
Now, seek some technical help to see just how much it would cost to design a simplified single repository which would perform the tasks currently reliant on the several sources the new database would replace.
Of course, in some instances, the pay back will be a long time, but in many the payback will be measured in months, not years.
How About ...?
One simple example which will apply to almost all businesses: your e-mail address lists. At present, I guess, everyone relies on their own personal frequent contacts list to send e-mail.
If a business were to determine the manner in which e-mail addresses were to be entered, and set up a corporate e-mail contact address book, a single entry or edit would replicate the correct address around the network. The decision needs to be made about whether the e-mail address will have the person’s name in plain English before it, and if so, will it be family name followed by given name or the other way around. Now the corporate e-mail address book becomes a useful tool for everyone.
And, while we are dealing with the e-mail address book, is your system capable of also recording relevant telephone numbers and address details? Probably. Once we have the address details entered, is it practical to extract these details into a merge file or simply into the address panel of your standard correspondence? Possibly.
Suddenly, your business has the beginnings of a CRM, probably without spending any money at all.
The Future
Once you have started to think about the huge amount of time wasted in duplicated data entry and maintenance, you will almost certainly begin to see that there is no need to do something which will cost nothing. It may well be better to do something that will cost a bit but which will repay your investment many times and within a reasonable payback time frame
If you would like some assistance in assessing this opportunity, speak to your IT consultant or call Tripos IT about the issue. An analysis of your data stores and the uses to which they are normally put will assist in the specification of your requirements. From there, it will probably be a simple calculation to determine what it is worth to simplify your data store and start saving money and time.
Tripos’ New Look
We hope you like the new Tripos look. Since moving offices at relatively short notice, we have been working with our PR people to come up with a new, more modern look and feel which would reflect the changes which have been occurring in our business over the last few years. We hope you like the result.
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Thank you.
Stewart Rankin Pty Ltd – ACN 007 972 901 & DL & LD Greenhough trading as
TRIPOS IT
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