Efficient businesses run on efficient IT.
Not everything is black and white in business. Yet the importance of business efficiency is indisputable. Efficient businesses create products, offer services, and accomplish their goals with the least amount of effort, expense, and waste. Efficient businesses run on efficient IT. There are many options available, but a Managed Services Provider (MSP) can help you find the best choices for your business.
Business efficiency is a top buzzword. Business leaders understand the value of generating more revenue using fewer resources. People, technology, and infrastructure are costly, and managing them is complicated. Efficiency helps increase profit margins and make more money available for business growth.
Yet many businesses say “business efficiency” without putting the concept into action. There are many ways to achieve business efficiency:
Hire capable people.
Improve company culture.
Establish targeted processes and procedures.
Encourage face-to-face communication and collaboration.
Automate routine, frequent tasks.
Find reliable outsourcing partners.
Schedule time and limit interruptions.
Educate employees about available resources.
One of the best ways to achieve business efficiency is to invest in technology. Integrating digital business methods can support a collaborative, communicative workforce. This helps save time, simplify processes, and identify new opportunities for business improvement.
As a very first step, we recommend exploring technology available to increase productivity and achieve greater business efficiency.
Efficient IT can take many different directions. We’ll focus on collaboration, automation, analytics, and security. Throughout we discuss how a Managed Services Provider (MSP) supports IT efficiency too.
Collaboration
Efficient collaboration begins with good communication. Microsoft Teams allows groups to work together online. People are no longer walking into colleagues’ offices and interrupting them to say, “you have a sec?” They simply post a query in a Teams chat and even attach the file they have a question about or jump on a quick video call.
Microsoft Teams allows people to work whenever they want, from wherever they are. They can coordinate tasks, share files, and relay information via chat or video. Plus, everyone on the team accesses the same aggregated information in one place.
Cloud-based communication via Teams also helps address the isolation distributed workers might experience. Sharing documents, reading, and revising in real-time, and hopping on a call from the desktop, remote workers feel included. Access to the same tools gives every employee a consistent experience.
How an MSP helps: The right business collaboration tools simplify employees’ collaboration in real time. Your MSP can set you up on Teams and integrate it with other important business applications.
Online collaboration tools and digital workplaces facilitate increased productivity by up to 30%. (Source: McKinsey)
Automation
SharePoint is another piece of software that can help business efficiency. Subscribers to Microsoft 365 have access to this document management and collaboration tool. It helps with collaboration, organization, version control, and developing a community. It’s also useful for automating workflow.
SharePoint allows you to create intelligent workflows for simple tasks. For example, you may have a review process for content. Previously, people ferried the documents from one desk to another throughout the office. Then, we moved to email chains. But both of these might mean bottlenecks when paper got lost on a desk or in someone’s inbox.
With SharePoint, you can set up automatic file sending through the levels of approval. When one person finishes, SharePoint notifies the next person of the completed review. With everyone accessing the document from their browser, you also gain version control. Plus, everyone can track what’s been happening with the document along the way.
How an MSP helps: Your MSP partner can review existing business procedures to identify processes to automate. Save time and effort. 83% of employees rely on technology for collaboration. (Source: Alfresco)
Analytics
Efficient businesses know where they are spending their time and money. They are measuring all they can to control resources and drive efficiency. Remember the days when the best way to track anything was to use pen and paper or, at best, input information into an Excel spreadsheet. Those days are gone.
Digital businesses have access to business data automatically captured by the software. Administrators can look in Teams or SharePoint for data dashboards. They might see what people are viewing most, how users interact, and where processes slow down.
You can also get a business overview using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This platform helps manage financials, monitor supply chain, accelerate sales, run warehouses, deliver projects on time, and more. For a monthly fee, small to medium-sized businesses access enterprise-level business management.
How an MSP helps: With analytics, your MSP can gauge hardware age to help predict when you’ll need to budget for upgrades. The MSP can also identify any software overlaps to identify cost savings. They’ll also see IT support ticket creation. Then, they can make changes to help cut those IT sticking points or problems.
Insight-driven businesses are growing at an average of more than 30% each year. (Source: Forrester)
Security
Business efficiency requires reliable, secure internet access. Having the right hardware and software can ensure you’re not slowed down by cybercrime.
You may have software that comes with firewall protection, but hardware firewalls are also important. Pairing the two, you need to avoid conflicts leading to weaknesses.
Installing a Unified Threat Management appliance is popular, too. It handles many security functions at once. This can save you time spent blocking phishing attempts or other malware. Your MSP partner can centrally administer security defenses to detect and prevent cyber intrusions.
How an MSP Helps: The MSP’s experts will get to know your business and its individual needs. Knowing industry-specific threats, an MSP finds the sweet spot between accessibility and security. They also identify technology to better secure users on the go or bringing their own devices to work.
52% of breaches featured hacking, 28% involved malware, and 32–33% included phishing or social engineering. (Source: Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report.
MSP Support
We’ve mentioned along the way areas where an MSP can help your business use its IT most efficiently. An MSP makes business more efficient in other ways, too.
For one, you need to contact only one partner for help. Don’t wait on the phone with one vendor, only to find out it’s actually a problem with another vendor’s services. Go to a single source of tech support to handle the tech stuff.
With an MSP in your corner, you’re also able to free up business resources. The IT team can offload routine tasks (such as system patching or reviewing alerts). Your technically minded talent can turn to business innovation and revenue generation. Then there’s the biggest hit to business efficiency: downtime. An MSP takes a proactive approach to monitoring and protecting your cyber assets. Your own team tries to do the same, but they’re also juggling many other business-related tasks. The MSP’s experts focus on preventing downtime.
Cybercrime is responsible for 22% of downtime, more than double the rate from weather-related disasters such as tornados and floods. (Source: The Ponemon Institute)
Partner with Us
An MSP can make a difference to your business efficiency. Even if you already have Word, Excel, Teams, and SharePoint in place, you may not be using them effectively. We can help. Your MSP partner sets up efficient IT to support collaboration, automation, analysis, and security. As we mentioned, reliable outsourcing partners are one way to improve business efficiency. Start out with us as your MSP.
Contact us today at (305) 400-0992!