Your business is developed enough to understand the uses and benefits of IT. You may even have an IT partner who you outsource your strategy and management too. Now that you’re at this point, you are able to devote more focus on streamlining your processes to increase efficiency and revenue.

But if you’re siloing your IT and your business processes, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

Technology is a process adrenaline shot

It’s one thing to have a working, reliable IT infrastructure. It’s another thing entirely to have IT that empowers process and business development. 

When you start thinking beyond up-time and service speed and begin considering how IT fits into your overall business process and strategy, you can begin seeing benefits like:

• Solutions that empower specific departments and processes
• Robust data and analytics to inform effectiveness and strategy
• Simple and often times automated resource management
• Maximize process visibility

But what specifically can IT streamline in your business processes?

SaaS and the economy of scale

Software as a service (SaaS) is a key draw to the cloud for many businesses. The core reason for this is scale. Before the cloud began democratizing software, only enterprises could afford niche, highly customized computing solutions. But the cloud and SaaS made some of the most technical, nuanced and enterprise-scale software solutions available to businesses of every size.

The cloud has a range of software for processes including:

• HR
• Payroll
• Accounting
• Project management
• Utilization
• Key performance indicator tracking

And often, you can find one software that does many of these things at once.

How does this streamline processes though? Mostly through robust computing power and automation. A lot of software on the market offer not only automized behaviors but also big data-backed analytics and procedures. That means you can inform your processes from best-in-class business to achieve better outcomes.

Your communications, connected

Most business is still conducted on the phone, but there are still many other important collaboration methods businesses use. Telephone, email, fax, messaging, video conferencing and more. And if you don’t have all of them connected, it’s confusing and inefficient to build your processes around them.

With unified communications, you can simplify your collaboration solutions so they all operate from a central hub. That means instead of integrating different software into your process, you only need to include one. And because its all connected, visibility is simplified. No more trying to track the email that led to a phone call that ended in a text message. With unified communications, you have full visibility and better procedural efficiency.

Automate the tedium

We’ve mentioned it briefly, but automation is the fastest-growing process amplifier that technology brings to the table. Automation can sound like something that only businesses like Amazon or Google have access to, but like many enterprise technologies, it’s becoming rapidly more available to SMBs. 

Automation has been around in small forms for years. Automatic out-of-office replies, number input call routing, even your thermostat’s schedule is a form of automation. But today, you can integrate automation to make the tedious bits of your business process much less time-consuming.

Ticketing portals, help desks, data organization and project management — these tasks and more have amazing automation opportunities that your business can leverage.

Many business leaders and employees feel a significant portion of their workflow can be automated. By automating those redundant or simple tasks, you save staff time and your business money. In fact, Forbes estimated that the average employee making $77,000 annually could result in a year-end savings of $9,240.  And a business leader? $27,720 saved annually.

Don’t go in alone

While IT offers near limitless opportunities to streamline your business processes, getting the right solutions for you is a tall order. That’s why we don’t recommend taking this on alone. Leverage an outsourced provider like KME Systems to help you with your goals and strategy, And once you’re ready for the implementation, you can leave the heavy lifting to us.