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08 Mar 2016

How to walk with bulls in the bear economy

Robert Janssen Director of Direct Sales Operations at Ricoh SA
Managed Document Services

Talk the new talk: How to brighten a colourless lexicon

The failing rand may well change the lingua-companis.

The economy has taken a dive. The rand/dollar exchange rate has tanked nearly 30% in 2015 alone, the pound costs more than R24 and the relative soaring euro has resulted in many companies falling under EMEA groups to rapidly increase prices of their products and services. But, while the word “efficiencies” has gained epic brevity, it seems unattainable. Or is it?

I fear the lingua-corpus or lingua-companis may already be changing from seeking efficiencies to promote new markets, revenues, and profits, to seeking efficiencies to merely remain afloat. Yet the essence remains: how to achieve the same or more using fewer resources, less effort, and less expenditure.

Paper is inefficient. Computers are, however, efficient at automating mundane, repetitive tasks. Few tasks are more mundane and repetitive than shuffling transaction-orientated business process documents. These are documents like invoices, proofs of delivery (PODs), weigh bills, goods received notes, leave forms, requisition slips, customer signup forms, customer application forms, medical records, patient details, and many, many more.

Computers are increasingly mobile, ubiquitous, powerful, and able to be integrated. These four aspects are uniting in a sea change that we often unite under the term digital.

Employees can waste too much time searching for or recreating information that already exists if documents, both print and electronic, are not centrally managed. We help you help them by looking at your operations, your employees, your workflow, your processes and even your customers. We propose immediate improvements, and improvements for the future.

Your information infrastructure is woven into the whole fabric of your operations. You need a holistic service to manage and operate that infrastructure as a whole and cloud-based tools offer the best current solution. These tools manage the entire office equipment environment, in realtime, regardless of equipment brand or manufacturer. You can keep tabs on hardware, supplies and other assets with reporting functions. You can track improvements, including cost reduction, and log service administration. You can schedule reports, even daily, to help streamline document workflows further.

Armed with that information you can begin to evaluate the way that information flows within your business – from start to finish. And that enables you to redesign, implement and manage better business processes.

You cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach since every business is different. The iterative approach includes your methods and needs, to find the right ways to streamline and optimise your processes, to grow your business or maintain margins in these tumultuous economic conditions.

But though the methods may be different depending on the business, the end goal is always the same: to help your employees, customers, distributors or resellers get anytime, anywhere access to critical business information in the format that is most useful to them. And your organisation becomes more agile and responsive to changes in your marketplace.

Time is more than money

Time is also customer goodwill. After all, who wants to be on hold for two hours?

You can improve customer service by making your customer-facing employees’ lives easier, as well as those of your customers, distributors or resellers. You can boost productivity and foster collaboration from the customer desk to the HR department, warehousing, and the mailroom.

You get quick wins by alleviating front-line sales and service employees from routine document management burdens. That allows them to focus on delivering more personal customer experiences. You thereafter examine your back office or behind the scenes environments for further improvements to promote efficiency and employee engagement.

Your teams can collaborate across departments, to provide a first-class experience both internally and externally, and help deliver timely, high quality products and services to your customers using better processes.

Better efficiencies and lower overheads

According to Gartner, it’s not uncommon for standard business activities to consume 60% to 70% of a department’s total budget.

We can help you control those costs. We will help you create secure, highly streamlined processes that make your organisation more efficient and effective. We can make sure you have the information you need, when you need it, to inform critical business decisions that maintain and grow your business by providing accurate, timely, and complete performance metrics on demand.

While your competition shores up their breached finance defences, let us help you streamline your operations, improve your customer service, build resiliency into your business and overcome the downturn. Adopt the new lingua-companis: become efficient and live to fight on.

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Keep updated on COVID-19 by visiting www.sacoronavirus.co.za. TRANSFORMATION IS THE FREEDOM TO THINK BIG

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