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Increase your Earnings

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This is not a surprise, really, but companies in general are always looking for ways to increase their earnings. There are two ways to do this.

1. Raise your top line

2. Reduce your bottom line

We will have a look at how proper information handling can help you do both.

Business Facets

There are many facets in the art of doing business that creates everyday challenges with information handling one way or another:

Sales: All documentation in regards of requests for quotations/proposals, marketing material, product information, deals, all written customer interactions etc.
Legal: Contracts and all legal documents with your company and customers.
Management: Making decisions based on information. How do you make sure you get the right information and filter out unimportant information?
Information workers: Everyone handling information, whether it be creation, sharing, archiving or even deletion of it.
Your support organization: Offering information and help as fast as possible.
Employees in general: How can they get hold of the correct information as quick as possible to do their job properly?

And the list goes on. Pick an area, then consider what insufficient or wrong information can do to disrupt that area. Is there a risk that this applies to your business?

Raise the top line

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Let us look at three different methods of raising your top line and information handling challenges within them.

Increase Sales

Do you spend a disproportionate amount of time answering request for quotations/proposals?
Can you quickly find and re-use material from earlier requests?
Are the teams doing the requests getting unnaturally large to be able to answer all parts of the bid?
Your sales organization spend a lot of time in-office to look for/create product information, instead of potential customer interaction?
Are leads informed and distributed in an effective manner within the sales departments?

Be More Effective

Have you gone through your organization and made sure that every tasks are done in the most optimal way?
If yes, what information enabled you to do this and how did you measure the results?
If no, what parts missing information stopped you from doing it?
To make your organization more lean and produce more/better for less, you have to know your pain points. Would better access to information within your company help you find these faster?

Higher product prices

Do you have the necessary information readily available for your customers to justify a higher pricing?
Can you easily compare your product verses your competitors to find differentiators that enables you to raise your prices?

Depending on whether your company have all or any of these challenges, it boils down to being able to quickly find existing information in your organization and use it. This will free up time to do the core tasks that makes money for your business while giving you a sturdy information base for communicating with your customers.

Lower the bottom line

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Let us look at some different methods used to lower your bottom line, and possible information challenges within them:

Lower cost

Which areas drive your cost, and do you know why? I.e. software licenses, operations, product cost, social cost, wages, office locations and so on.
While the cost numbers should be easy to find, you have to understand the numbers. How to obtain that information, and make sure it is correct?

Change of competency

While not necessarily the most pleasant thing to do, sometimes you have to lay off people. Either you’re too many, or you have to change the competency of the work force. How do you map the competency and figure out who to keep or not?
If you have to get a different competency, how do you decided which competency is needed, and how do you get it? Perhaps you already have it in the existing work force?
If in a hiring process. How do you most effectively go through the list of the applicants to make sure you get the right ones?

Being able to find the correct information, and then ask the right questions concerning your business enables you to make the right decisions. The information is usually always there in abundance, the problem is getting to the correct information in an easy and quick manner.

It is all about location

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Where is all this golden information? Excluding public available information, our experience is that it is mainly four places you find it.

1. Central company stores like

File shares
Document archive/storage systems
Intranets
Emails

2. The users own computers/devices.

3. Cloud store services like Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive etc.

4. In the minds of people.

The challenge is finding a system that incorporates the three first places in a secure, efficient and affordable manner. Then this system must help with communication amongst people since information is “stored” there as well. It is an interaction circle between information, processes, tools and people.

Finding the gems

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Let us say we have found a system that is able to handle the whole interaction circle. Now that system must enable us to find the different gemstones we are looking for amidst the treasure trove that is our company intelligence. In an easy, secure and reliable manner.

Let us put together all the pieces, and see what you ought to consider:

Security

Where, physically, does this system store its information, derived from YOUR information? US/EU/ASIA or other regions or countries?
Transportation of data to- and from-, how is that done?
User information, how is that handled?

Interface

Is it intuitive and easy to use, or does it require a lot of training?
Speed. How fast do you get your results?
Do you get the expected results?
Where is the interface available?

Complexity

How hard is it to setup the system in your organization?
Does the system have to be tailor made, or does it work out of the box?
How reliable is the system?
Does it scale well?
What are the Operations requirements?

Features

Create a matrix of the features you require the system to have.
Include which systems it must support to be able to reach all data in your organization.
Remember to include effective and secure sharing of information.

Price

Does the supplier give an understandable and scalable price model?
Do you get “bang for the buck”?

Time to choose

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You have decided you have a need to better make available information in your organization. We recommend you setup a matrix with the needs that you have, including the “consider list” above and match the different suppliers and their systems.

Make a score for each point you have in your list and add the scores together for each vendor. Keep in mind that you can give different scores for functions/parts you rate higher (i.e. price, different functionality, operations and so on).

After you have created the matrix, get hold of the 3-5 best systems and start testing. Again, create a test-matrix with important test-cases that the systems shall solve in your organization. Differential scores are also valid here.

You should by now have a good starting point for choosing a system, and will most probably choose wisely. However, if you are still unsure, you should invite the chosen vendors to come and make a case and demonstration of their systems and present their roadmap. This will give you even more information before you reach a conclusion on which system to go for.

Exselo is creating the next generation Business Productivity tool.

We are executing on a vision to help people and organizations perform work in a different and significantly more effective way using search technology as a key ingredient in our solutions.