Black clouds over enterprises

Business sentiment has worsened recently. High inflation and related price increases, rising costs of doing business, problems in recruiting suitable employees and wage pressures are real problems that cause anxiety and stress. The looming economic crisis will force companies to gradually automate and seek optimization in new areas.

Companies that care about continued growth and stability, despite the challenging times (especially in the software, industrial or food service industries), will want to take advantage of modern solutions in advance, thereby ensuring relative market security. Today’s realities promote those companies that can keep up with technological innovations. Assimilating and implementing modern technological solutions will save not only human resources, but also financial and time resources.

Technological support in the company

Business owners in the flurry of daily tasks and responsibilities often forget that the world of technology has moved forward. Every business not only can, but should, take advantage of technology, which on the one hand will allow it to grow, and on the other hand will make the business immune to the ever-expanding crisis.

The implementation of IT technology is a number of benefits for any growing company. First of all, it is the saving of many resources, which can be located from other areas of the business. The use of such a solution also frees employees from performing monotonous, tedious tasks and locates their potential in more creative tasks that will allow them to realize their full potential.
Support in the form of a technology person inside the organization or a technology partner in the form of a software house, for example, can also be helpful.

At WeAstronauts, we often become just such a technology partner. We not only create dedicated solutions, but also provide a comprehensive consulting service for business owners in technical-technological-business aspects.

Behind us are many different kinds of implementations and realizations. In the section below, based on our own experience, we will show elaborate examples of what businesses can implement at their site to improve their operations.

Streamlining your business with technology

Every company faces different kinds of challenges and problems. Therefore, a tailor-made and customized solution is often needed in such cases.

ERP (from Enterprise Resources Planning) systems are often “combos” of capabilities with universal functions tailored to the buyer’s needs. With ERP, we are able to cover the control and management of the most important resources and processes in almost every business area of the company: sales, finance, accounting, warehouse, human resources, procurement, production, etc.

However, the implementation of such a system is a costly investment, often calculated in hundreds of thousands of zlotys and months of work, so in each case it must be supported by a thorough analysis of the company based on its strengths and weaknesses and the real needs of the company.

When implementing improvement solutions in our clients’ companies, we conduct a business analysis at the very beginning to determine which areas need improvement.

What can we streamline and automate?

Business processes

Investing in business process automation is an opportunity for many companies to reduce reliance on human labor by delegating some tasks to IT systems. Automation makes many routine activities in a company more cost-effective, streamlined and error-proof.

It’s worth remembering that automating such a process often means subtracting a lot of duties from employees on a monthly basis (!) which automatically frees up resources devoted to simple and routine activities.

Examples of process automation include emailing, record keeping and recruitment processes, or invoicing. This includes anything that we can define as permanent events in the company.

Reminder systems

If internal communication is efficient, the company achieves its goals without wasting resources. If it fails, unnecessary chaos ensues. By implementing modern IT solutions, we can easily receive information from both employees and production equipment, and then supervise the status of individual communications.

Implementing a reminder system will keep an eye on any deadlines and automatically notify those concerned, such as via SMS or email. This naturally translates into increased efficiency in various areas of the company.

Task systems

Managing the tasks of employees in a company is the basis for the efficient operation of the enterprise. The saving of capacity and its proper placement depends on this element.

By implementing technological improvements in the form of process automation, systems can automatically generate and assign activities to individual employees. This not only saves a lot of time, but also reduces the possibility of mistakes – thanks to appropriate algorithms, tasks will be efficiently supervised and enforced without wasting resources.

File storage, document handling

Every business is a series of documents, contracts or invoices. This aspect often requires the involvement of the people who will be responsible for it, and still the final chaos creeps in. Today, it is already increasingly common to find processes that automate most topics related to the circulation of documents, the issuance of invoices or the signing of contracts. Automation on the basis of data can generate documents from prepared templates, keep an eye on their status, or send them to target persons. What’s more, maintaining the right structures or schemes will make everything well thought out and arranged.

Thus, the work of several people can be managed even by one part-time person. And over time and development, the process will be fully automated and will not require ongoing involvement.

Handling of corporate finances

Adequate cash flow, the creation of financial forecasts or control of revenues and expenses are the absolute basics of a “healthy” business. Absolute control of these issues is crucial for a company to survive and grow in a competitive market. Unfortunately, many companies have chaos in their internal structures, which in the long run can even lead to their downfall.

Any company will appreciate the opportunities that come from automating the control of finances. With its help, this control (especially in the medium and large enterprise sector) is much simpler and clearer. Up to a certain point in the company’s development, a simple spreadsheet will suffice, but as staff and employee expenses increase and the business scales with new branches, it is worthwhile to take care of a more professional service.

Practical examples of its application

Example

For our client, which is an employment agency for caregivers of the elderly abroad, we made a dedicated ERP system to optimize internal processes and streamline the company’s operations.

As a result of a thorough business analysis, we localized the main objectives to be realized by the executed system. Each employee was given their own user account in the system, where they can see the assigned tasks and resources they have access to.

Directories

The company needed to conveniently store and archive data about clients, caregivers, wards, contractors, or contracts. Word documents on a larger scale were no longer legible, finding information was associated with great difficulty and a lot of time.

Processes

The company had many complex but repetitive processes that were handled on a daily basis and involved most of the office staff’s time. We broke down processes such as recruiting candidates, handling caregiver travel, and starting to work with clients into smaller steps, automated them and implemented them in the system. As employees carry out these processes, data in files are automatically updated, tasks are created for employees, documents are generated and notifications are sent.

Document circulation

The company relied heavily on documents, the status of which had to be guarded by employees. Each contract was first filled out and printed, then sent to the customer for signature. A scan of that contract had to go back to the employee, who had to save it, print it out and place it in the archive. With a large number of such duties, it is not difficult to make a mistake and “lose” the status of a single document.

In our implementation, each document has its own representation in the system. Employees can track their status, view the history of changes, add attachments, and assign them to existing data on the site for easy retrieval. Documents can generate reminders or can be automatically deleted after a specified period of time.

Print generation

During their daily work, the company’s employees spent a lot of time filling out voluminous Word forms to prepare documents for handling various processes. This work was tedious and prone to errors that were hard to detect later.

For this reason, we implemented functionality to automatically generate documents from predetermined templates. The system populates the template with already existing data and makes it available as a downloadable file. So, for example, once entered into the service personal data can then be used to generate many documents in the future.

Investment in the development of the company

The above solutions and examples are just a percentage of what makes it possible to incorporate technological solutions into enterprise structures. Years of development, automation and the search for new schemes lie ahead. The largest companies have already recognized the potential arising from modern IT solutions, so they are successively implementing them in their structures. This situation can be compared to an arms race. The companies that implement automation the fastest will achieve a competitive advantage, which will naturally translate into better business results. It is worth going with the flow and taking the example of market leaders, because automation is the future.

The system we prepared allowed easy and intuitive recording of the data handled by the company. Views for viewing or entering this data were designed, based on consultations with the company’s employees, in order to maximize their use.

Support in automation

Business process automation can bring many benefits to a company, but it must be preceded by a thorough analysis of the company and its needs. The key to success is to work with an experienced team of analysts and developers who use technology to create solutions that optimize business processes.

As a software house, we are a technology partner for our clients. We not only implement solutions, but also provide comprehensive consulting and post-implementation support.

If you need help with business process automation or are thinking about implementing it in your company, contact us. We will analyze your company’s capabilities and propose the best solution using new technologies. We invite you to take advantage of a free consultation.

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In a word of conclusion

Streamlining businesses with modern technology increases the efficiency of their operations and minimizes the risk of mistakes. With the help of automation, we can also effectively improve the company’s information processes and reduce fixed costs. Implementation should be viewed in terms of investment, not cost, because every step taken towards automation is an effective saving for the company on many levels.

If you don’t know whether your company can benefit from implementing modern IT solutions, just talk to us. Make an appointment for a free consultation, where we will talk about the possibilities for your business. Automation is the future, and your business can tap into it today.