There are a lot of ways people will try to spend your money, especially during a difficult economy.  When businesses are struggling, everyone is looking for the silver bullet to keep their business alive and there are plenty of people out there who say they have it for sale.  But how do you decide which ones to try and which ones to pass on?

From a technology perspective, we generally encourage our clients to focus on projects that can have a real return on investment for their business.  This can be in creating efficiencies, saving real dollars, or saving time for their most likely overworked staff.  Seem daunting?  It doesn’t have to be.  You don’t need a gaggle of Harvard MBA’s to figure this out for you because YOU are the only expert in your business. You can achieve success in this by following 3 easy steps:

1) Identify things in your company that are done repetitively.  These are the items that by shaving just a little bit of time off the regular process you can generate great time savings for the business.  Examples of these might be  time entry, regular reporting, or product inventory.

2) Find ways to automate some or all of the repetitive process.  Sometimes this can be as simple as having shared documents and spreadsheets so that there is not duplicate entry being performed.  On a larger scale, it might involve investing is a work flow software designed for your industry.  In between would be having a custom web based application built for a process that is specific to your business.

3) EVALUATE THE RESULTS!  Take the time before you change the process to measure how long it takes.   Then after you automate the process, measure it again.  You will quickly start to see the results you can achieve and realize where future efforts can be worth while.

Changing a process you know and love is not always easy, so start small.  Find something that can be an easy win for everyone involved.  Most importantly, make sure you communicate with those involved in the process that you are not trying to automate them out of a job, but trying to help them focus their talent where it is best used.