It’s no secret that automation is one of the major trends that most businesses have tried to incorporate into their business plans, most with some middling success. The problem becomes that many businesses don’t really have a strategy for building out automated tools for their business, so they may not be able to take advantage of the benefits automation can bring.
Technology is a big part of doing business for a lot of organizations. One issue that comes into play is that managing that technology can get a little much for a small organization or one that doesn’t actively have some type of plan of how to organize their IT in a way that can keep that technology from being a risk or a problem. This month, we’ll take a look at a couple things that can be done to clean up your IT and make it be more of a benefit to your organization.
When we talk about projects, we typically mean new technology deployment. Our technicians spend a lot of time trying to outfit our clients with the right technologies for their business. What becomes evident pretty quickly is that most businesses don’t just need help with the IT projects, they need to get the tools in place for their own project management needs. In this week’s blog, we will briefly discuss what businesses should be looking for in project management and how today’s tools can help your organization be more productive and get more done.
Unfortunately, the number of cyberattacks is consistently growing and many of those attacks target business end users. This means that any account that requires a password for access could conceivably be compromised should attackers gain access to its credentials. At Coleman Technologies, we promote the use of multi-factor authentication (also known as two-factor authentication or 2FA) to mitigate some of the risk inherent with the use of password-based accounts in business.
We hate to be the bad guy, but we’re certain that you cannot multitask nearly as well as you think you can. Multitasking is just not how the human brain works, and whether or not you believe in the psychology of it, we think you stand to benefit by outsourcing some of the tasks on your plate to a managed service provider.
Taking a sip of cocoa, Trinket leaned back from his computer and let out a long sigh. Here it was, barely after 9:00 in the morning, and his agenda was already impossibly full. Around him, Santa’s Workshop was in full swing, the other elves frantically working to ensure that all the deliveries were prepped for the Boss before the big day came.
Instead of categorizing your notes into folders and notebooks, Keep is organized by labels. You can create labels to find everything you have stored on a particular topic. Fortunately, it's also easy to use, so in this tip I'll show you how to use Google Keep to track all the important information you need to process and store.
Farms often cover miles and miles of real estate. Traditionally, this makes it more difficult to keep track of everything that is going on around the property. Drones can make monitoring the status of the farm much simpler. With specialized sensors that collect important data, farmers are able to successfully manage irrigation levels, fertilization, and crop spacing, leading to higher agriculture output. Using drones, farmers can also manage livestock much simpler.
You’ve got better things to do than organizing and prioritizing your emails manually. Granted, you’ll still need to respond to important emails, but most email clients have everything you need to set up a system that automatically parses and sorts emails based on a whole slew of different factors. It will take a little time, and likely a few rounds of adjustments to get your inbox to work the way you want it to, but we’re going to show you the tools that will help get you there.
There are multiple add-ons and browser extensions available to help boost your email templates with more dynamic options, but today, we’ll be focusing on the baked-in capabilities that Gmail comes with.
When we say that some businesses are using Windows 7, what we really mean is that with a remarkable market share that still sits around 23 percent, a lot of businesses have chosen not to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft’s latest OS. In fact, as of January, when Microsoft officially did away with support for Windows 7, nearly half (47 percent) of SMBs were still utilizing it. It’s not a good scene. Let’s take a look at why so many haven’t moved off of Windows 7.
When most people think about IT, their thoughts turn to the phone calls they make to tech support that usually take forever and feel like they do little to move the recovery process along, or they think about the technician who comes in to repair something onsite, making a huge mess and causing a distraction. Naturally, this has made many business owners and users loath to call in IT services, preferring to make do as best they can with what they have. Neglecting IT-related problems, just like neglecting signs of malaise, can exacerbate problems substantially.
In so many words, data automation is the collection and transcription of data using software, rather than the outdated and time-consuming manual processes that were once necessary.
Rather than one of your valuable employees being committed to data entry instead of the other tasks that are better suited to their talents and abilities, data automation utilizes technology to attend to it. As a result, your team can focus on their other responsibilities, while your data is managed more efficiently and accurately.
As we established from the very start, email can very rapidly shift from an asset to a considerable time commitment, often multiple times throughout the workday. If possible, avoid getting drawn in by reducing the total amount of time you spend in your mailbox. There are a few ways to accomplish this:
It’s been said that knowledge is the best weapon. For the small and medium-sized business looking to navigate this situation, this couldn’t ring more true. To be able to make the best financial and operational decisions possible, SMBs are turning to data analysis, in real time. By being able to look at the data that is coming in and going out in real time, a decision maker can swiftly make educated decisions. This can help businesses stay afloat in times where they are at their most vulnerable.
To start, let’s consider the situation that we find ourselves in.
With COVID-19 still spreading, the general consensus is that spending time around other people is currently a bad thing, making the workplace a less-than-ideal environment in which to spend one’s time. As a result, many people have self-quarantined themselves in their homes. With today’s available technology, however, this does not mean that they cannot get work done, with the cloud offering great opportunities for collaboration and remote work. This plays into VoIP’s benefits quite nicely.
We’ll get the simplest habit out of the way first: don’t leave things, like lights and peripherals, powered on when they aren’t necessary. Build the habit of switching them off when they aren’t in use. It may help to label your switches to ensure the right lights are turning off at the right time.
Modern technology solutions are another good way to reduce the amount of power that your hardware and infrastructure require. Public cloud options, like Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365, offer a dual benefit in that they not only enable remote capabilities (more on that shortly), they allow you to scale back your on-site infrastructure needs. As a result, your energy requirements are likewise decreased. The same result can come from keeping your hardware and business infrastructure (like the aforementioned lights) up-to-date, as newer technologies are more energy efficient.
On the subject of using up-to-date solutions, these solutions also help minimize the need to print very much at all. Using collaborative technology can therefore reduce the amount of paper waste your business produces.
Returning briefly to the idea of remote work solutions, enabling your employees to operate from home is another means of reducing the environmental impact your business contributes. Not only will your office require less energy by default, there will be fewer emissions generated thanks to the reduced amount of traffic on the road from commuters.
If you do require your staff members to be present in the office, encouraging them to set up carpooling groups is another way that you can help reduce the emissions they produce. After all, one car produces fewer emissions than four would, and it gives your staff time to connect, to boot.
The average office has quite a few disposable options that could very well be replaced with reusable ones. Switch the paper and plastic products in the break room for washable, reusable options, down to the coffee filter. Instead of offering sugar packets and individual creamer cups, have communal dispensers that can be refilled. Will it make a huge difference? No, but it is something, and it will ultimately be less costly to your business in the long run.
As the nature of the work environment has shifted, laptops just make more sense for many employees than the desktop. This is good, because laptops not only help enable remote work, they also require far less energy in comparison.
Finally, as you make these upgrades to your location, equipment, and processes, make sure you are properly disposing of the elements you are replacing--including your equipment. Due to the environmentally-hazardous components that are used to make them, most modern pieces of technology shouldn’t just be thrown out. Instead (once you’ve made sure that all data has been good and wiped from the device) enlist a reputable professional to ethically recycle your device and its components.
We can help you with many of these initiatives, while improving the general functionality of your business’ technology. To learn more, give Coleman Technologies a call at (604) 513-9428.
It’s not a secret that departmental cooperation is increasingly central to the workflows of today. Businesses need to stay agile, which means more has to be done with less. As more people take on more responsibilities, there needs to be better communication, and ultimately trust, if a business’ goals are going to be met. This has businesses of all sizes looking for tools that will help their staff be more collaborative, more efficient, and meet those benchmarks that will allow for organizational growth.
It seems ironic that a strategy that most businesses need to foster, is actually getting harder to achieve. Today’s workforce is different in many ways, but one of the most glaring weaknesses of the modern workforce is that their needs supersede that of the organization they work for. This is not wrong per say, but it can be a major problem for smaller organizations that need collaborative initiatives to fuel their products and services. With the gig economy growing rapidly, and the cost benefits of hiring contract and outsourced workers, it makes it harder than ever to get a staff of people on the same page.
There are several more barriers to collaboration, including:
When you are asking people to work with others for a common goal, personalities can get in the way. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be some semblance of professionalism and workplace decorum, but the truth is that some people just don’t like working with other people. If you are running a small business petty squabbles are unacceptable and can really hurt your chances of success.
It is important that every member of a team knows exactly what is expected of them, but it’s the decision makers that need to understand who works well with who and what type of collaboration to use. There are three different types of positive workplace collaboration. They are:
Most businesses use technology to bridge the gap between departments, teams, and employees. Technology is making it more possible than ever to collaborate, and many of a business’ technology investments are made with collaboration in mind. The idea is that if employees are expected to use centralized management software like a Customer Relationship Management tool or a document management and storage system like Microsoft SharePoint, that all the information and resources are then available from one place, making collaborative work more possible.
Today, there is new software that simplifies the process. Software like Microsoft Teams and Slack are designed simply as an instant messaging-fueled forum that integrates with many of the major CRMs and other management solutions, creating a central hub to speed up communication and collaboration. These applications allow teams to be more agile and more productive.
Collaboration is a huge part of doing business in the information age. If you want to learn more about how technology can fuel your business’ productivity, reach out to the IT experts at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.
Many parents have historically used a gamification strategy to convince their young’uns to cooperate better with notoriously less-fun parts of daily life. Take clean-up time, for instance, which many parents will turn into a race between themselves and their children to see who can pick up quicker. Taking an unappealing task and adding game-like elements to motivate people to do it is the concept that forms the foundation of gamification.
This isn’t a new idea, either. Mark Twain knew what he was talking about when he wrote about Tom Sawyer tricking his friends into white-washing a fence for him. By making the activity seem elite and enjoyable, he hoaxed and hoodwinked his friends into completing his chore for him while they all enjoyed proving themselves capable. As was written at the end of that particular chapter:
“If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do ... There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.”
If the psychology behind this sounds silly to you, consider the concept of “employee of the month.”
Human psychology is a big part of why gamification has been shown to be so impactful in motivating employees. As a species, human beings tend to be strongly motivated by certain desires, namely:
While many tasks originally lack the potential for most, if not all, of these desires to be filled, gamification can inject this capability by fulfilling all three of these desires. If an employee were to have the satisfaction of knowing that they performed most admirably, gaining some perks and being looked upon with favor from the higher-ups, it only makes sense that they would continue to strive to that position from that point on. Furthermore, it also helps to motivate your other employees to strive harder, so they may have a chance of receiving the same benefits as well.
Don’t believe me? Just look at Google, where gamification has helped chop down travel expenses by allowing the person with the most budget left over after a business trip to keep the difference.
If you’re now considering a more gamified approach to business-as-usual, you have a great variety of options available to you. Different use cases and different industry types each have their own options to do so, all with the potential to be a great investment.
You can also elect how much you want to put into gamification. Sure, there are solutions out there specifically to gamify common business processes, but you could also come up with your own homespun methods. Maybe an employee who visibly went above and beyond one day would receive an entry into an end-of-year drawing for a desirable prize. You really are only limited by your creativity - or how long you’re willing to spend searching online for ideas.
Just as though you’re the parent trying to convince your employees to pick up their playthings, the key to effective gamification is to turn a rote task into an engaging activity.
Have you ever tried out any gamification methods in your office? Which ones did you find most effective? Share what you did in the comments!
The first considerations you need to make are fairly straightforward.
You really do get what you pay for. Rather than settling for a cheaper system with plans of replacing it later, make sure you select a system that can be upgraded and expanded (yes, there is a difference). That way, you can avoid doubling your costs by eliminating the need to procure more than one system. It also helps to seek out a vendor that can supply all the needs your business has - like additional hardware for your POS, or enhanced software to power it - to simplify your processes.
As mentioned before, your POS system should have the ability to grow as your needs of it do. For instance, while you may want to implement customer pagers at some point, it is probably wiser to focus on the essentials - like receipt printers and cash drawers. However, you will also want to make sure that your POS system has the capability to be upgraded to incorporate more advanced features as your business grows.
Although this isn’t too far off from integration, you may want your POS to integrate with your inventory system, your quoting system, your CRM software, or any other business app on your network. Depending on your needs, you might even want your security cameras to pull a feed from your POS system to record purchases.
Let’s face facts… you don’t want to find your POS system experiencing technical difficulties without anyone available to help you resolve them. Whether its complications with the software itself or a hardware issue, you need to be sure that support is always available to you.
When running a business, it is crucial that you have the technology to properly take payments. Coleman Technologies can help ensure that you are prepared to do business with reliable solutions. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to get started.
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Coleman Technologies Inc.
20178 96 Avenue, C400
Langley, British Columbia V1M 0B2
Operations Center
6600 Chase Oaks Blvd, Suite 100 Plano
TX 75023
