Cape Town, Western Cape, 03 Feb 2012
By now, most of us have returned to work after a well-deserved break after 2011, a year characterised by global economic uncertainty, delayed decisions, reduced budgets, and stagnant growth for many South African businesses. Entering 2012, however, it does not seem to be all doom and gloom, since there is growth forecast for South Africa; although it's by no means worth “writing home about”.
The major question on many people's minds for 2012 is how to maintain profitability and deliver growth in an economy that does not seem to be poised to support these goals. The good news is that there's no reason to panic just yet, since there are ways to thrive in these conditions - and businesses with foresight will do so. The answer is simpler than you would think: do more with less. You're probably thinking: “Well, that's fairly obvious, but how can I practically make this happen in my business?”
One of the simplest ways to do more with less is to implement a well-planned intranet to help bring people and processes together efficiently. Modern intranets have developed into powerful business application platforms delivering a variety of solutions, including, but not limited to, collaboration, document management, workflow, search, social interaction and business intelligence. The modern intranet can cost-effectively deliver business solutions to your requirements, in isolation or hybrid form.
Impressively, platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010 can deliver these solutions not only to staff internally, but also outside of your business network and to mobile devices, including tablets. Delivering in this way, you can do more with less and improve efficiency simply by making your workforce more productive - even if your market does not experience any significant growth.
In this day and age, modern workforces also demand that services in the business they work for be delivered in a similar fashion to popular social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Failure to do so can lead to frustration and the loss of key skills due to not providing a suitable, informative, adaptable work environment.
If you already have an intranet in place, and are effectively delivering business services in your organisation (and have improved your bottom line as a result), it's not the end of the road. You now have the opportunity to take the gains you've made and lessons learnt and extend them to your clients and suppliers.
By delivering automated processes with a business process management suite like K2 via your extranet, you can cut the costs of doing business with your clients and suppliers. You can also make it easier for them to do business with you, which may, in fact, lead to increased revenues and market share.
You can also engage more with your clients and suppliers by providing them with informative reporting regarding the progress of issues, orders, requests and the like, which can put less pressure on your employees to constantly perform these repetitive tasks, freeing their time up for more valuable activities. It will also empower your clients and add value to the relationships you hold with them.
One channel that not many businesses in South Africa are utilising effectively is the Internet; and once again, a combination of Microsoft SharePoint and K2 can provide the platform for powerful solutions to be developed, which can either extend your business capabilities or provide for an entirely new channel and way of engaging with clients. This channel can enable you to effectively inform, connect, engage and interact with your clients, improving on existing value, but potentially offering goods or services more cost-effectively, offering a broader variety or tapping into new markets and clients altogether.
With the improvement of bandwidth into South Africa, many businesses now have the opportunity to extend their trade by using Internet portals that not only deliver products and/or services, but also an online experience that enables them to engage with their existing and new customers at a deeper and more personalised level. In these times, this is crucial to ensuring loyalty, a counter to the threat posed by rapidly changing local and global markets, and the new breed of suppliers serving them.
The key aspect to bear in mind when considering the above-mentioned investments is that, at the end of the day, they will end up paying for themselves, either in the form of reduced cost, improved productivity or increased revenues. Also, should the capital costs of the software investments required for the above-mentioned solutions be something that makes you nervous in these uncertain times, Office 365 is a much less worrisome option to consider, enabling you to subscribe to the productivity platform without upfront capital expenses.
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