Using Technology for Better Business
By Ryan Mullaney
If I could just start over and build an infrastructure for my business that
works.
As a business owner myself, I know I've uttered these words more than once and
from talking to other managers and owners, I don't think I'm the only one who
has.
Of course, it's not that easy. Time is an important issue when you're busy
running a business and cost of course, is another critical aspect. The most
important (and yet most often overlooked) issue in a new technology acquisition
scheme is understanding exactly what the technology can do and more importantly,
what can it do for you and your business.
On the surface, this seems like a silly thing to say – of course you wouldn't
purchase something as complex and expensive as say, a new accounting package
without know exactly what it does and whether or not it meets your needs, right?
But have you thought about how handy it would be to combine your accounting
needs with a sales automation system which could generate orders and invoices
automatically as your sales force steps through their daily functions? How about
combining all of that with a website that actively markets your company's goods
and services AND automatically generates new leads that are tracked and assigned
to your sales team? How about a document management system that ties in and
gives your employees one location to store all related documents and versions of
those documents? Pretty powerful stuff.
What I'm advocating is not that you have to run out and purchase and implement
all of these systems at once; rather that you need to have an understanding of
what technology is available and what the needs of your business are.
What I'm going to do over the next few articles is build a business technology
framework from the ground up and create a 'virtual business' that harnesses
technology to make my operation more efficient and more profitable than just
slapping together what's available at the lowest cost. In these articles, we
will build an integrated system that meets the needs of a start-up business, but
can grow as the business grows.
Technologies to be covered include:
Server and network selections
Retail management systems and Point of Sale (POS)
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Web-based marketing and E-commerce
Disaster recovery
Mobile data access and communications
Accounting systems
Integration
Next Article – "Sure Hope This Works - The Business Plan"