Ask any business leader what their main goal is, and you’ll get a one-word answer: growth. It’s a universal objective, but one that can be extremely difficult to achieve due to the challenges and obstacles that lie along the way. To guarantee successful growth, you need to first ensure your business is adequately prepared to be scaled up. Any inefficiencies present will only worsen if your growth plan is not implemented correctly.
Thankfully, Content Services is specifically designed to help your business break free from inefficient processes that are holding it back. Cutting out unnecessary steps in workflows, organising data more intuitively, and controlling how it’s used are just three of the ways that new technology can streamline your organisation.
Workflows in some companies end up being so complex that even the simplest of tasks take an excruciatingly long time to complete. Imagine that an employee from one department needs to request data from sales, but it's stored on paper in a filing cabinet. It would have to be brought over in person or scanned through; and that’s if they can find it amongst all their other invoices. Afterwards, someone has the responsibility to ensure it has made its way back to storage, and there’s always the risk that it’s been modified, lost, or destroyed at some point on its journey. Plus, at each contact point, this process may require decisions to be made and verified. Ultimately, all this slows business workflows down and reduces productivity considerably.
Luckily, Content Services provides an incredibly simple solution: workflow automation. Cut out the unnecessary steps and let your employees get on with their work. With an automated system, the same story would play out completely differently. With a quick request, approvals would be given and verified with one click, the invoice could be found instantly thanks to smart indexing that utilises tags, and it could be accessed right away. Once workflows are functioning more efficiently, productivity levels increase as employees focus on doing the high-value tasks they were hired for. In the end, efficiency and productivity are the cornerstones of growth.
If data is stored on paper, or even on servers but with no clear system, then you are unintentionally hindering your own growth. When information is difficult to track down, employees waste valuable time looking for it. This is frustrating for them and infuriating for customers that are unlucky enough to deal with these delays. In short, poor data organisation will cause drops in productivity and your relationship with customers is likely to suffer.
Again, the solution is a simple one. Content Services provides smart systems for organising your data, with paper documents scanned onto a digital storage system like the cloud. During this process, tags can be added for advanced indexing. This basically means that in future you only need to search for keywords, for example the date and document type, and you will instantly find what you’re looking for. Once all your data has been digitalised, it will be securely stored and can be accessed by anyone with authorisation at any time.
If your growth plan includes hiring new employees, they won’t have to get their heads around a convoluted and inefficient storage system that would only end up complicating matters further as they add data themselves. Instead, they can get straight down to doing their job. Fulfilled, efficient employees help build strong, lasting relationships with customers.
Data is critical to businesses nowadays, but unless you control it effectively you won’t be able to extract its full potential. A huge pool of data is useless if your employees can’t access it as it leads to wasted time. To demonstrate, this is especially problematic for international companies with offices operating in different time zones around the globe. Waiting until the next day for the information you need just isn’t acceptable in today’s world of instant satisfaction; you can’t leave customers on hold indefinitely, or they’ll go to a competitor that treats them better.
In order to remedy this and foster growth, businesses should consider investing in Content Services. If the Content Services platform is setup in the correct way, data can be stored digitally meaning that access can be granted as required. If an employee located in another country needs to see or edit a document that was filed by another department, they can request access and retrieve it instantly. This fosters collaboration between teams and offices of the same company located in different areas. This way, issues such as time zone differences are not a challenge anymore, and no customers are left waiting impatiently. Customer satisfaction is, after all, a major driver of business success.
In short, most of the inefficiencies around business content which are holding back growth can be resolved using Content Services technology. Reduce wasted time and get your entire business working in unison, regardless of time zone or physical location. Digital data is available to whoever needs it at any time, facilitating collaboration between departments and offices. The end aim of all these changes is to improve efficiency and streamline your business to increase productivity and provide better customer service. Customer satisfaction and a productive business are instrumental in achieving the growth you’re aiming for.
Efficient data management is essential for businesses to improve their workflow and boost profitability. The exchange of information is a key process in an organisation. However, relying on analogue workflows frequently leads to errors and delays, which can be avoided with an efficient alternative; the implementation of technology.
This whitepaper builds upon the findings of Kyocera's Business Digitalisation in Europe Outlook 2019. The whitepaper builds on the pains and challenges identified by businesses from across Europe through research across the continent which paints a wider picture of the state of digital transformation.