4 Ways to Streamline Your Business

When you’re running a business, every moment counts. Time and money cannot be wasted, yet as a business owner, there’s a lot to do, making you wonder how could you possibly find the time or resources to get everything done – and done well?

The success of your business greatly depends on your business operations and how well they perform and how efficient they are. You need to audit your business as a whole, but you also need to audit each department, so that you can determine what needs improving.

While each business will have different needs, most companies will have the following departments: HR, marketing, production, and finance. This article will, therefore, focus on how you can streamline these elements of your business.

1. HR

Human Resources (HR) is the department in a business that is responsible for managing resources relating to employees of the same company. The employees supporting your business are one of your biggest assets, as without them, you wouldn’t have a functioning business. Therefore, good and effective HR management needs to be implemented.

There are a lot of processes for those working in HR to get the hang of, and while they need to overview and monitor all situations, you can relieve stress by putting more responsibility on your employees in other departments. There are many systems which allow employees to request their own holiday, know when future appraisals are imminent, and which centralise all data, such as birth names, birthdays and emergency details, into one place – the Cloud. BreatheHR and other similar Cloud-based HR programs are ideal when it comes to monitoring your company’s employees.

2. Marketing

The term ‘marketing’ is broad, with many job roles and titles gathering under the same umbrella. Because you have email marketing, content marketing, SEO, PPC, traditional marketing methods such as TV adverts and much more, overviewing and monitoring your marketing can be a headache at times.

With so many niches in marketing, you need to ensure you’re hiring a diverse range of skillsets. You cannot expect your social media team to also run your content marketing; instead, there need to be two separate teams which collaborate with one another. Having employees spread themselves too thin can heighten stress and cause efficiency and employee morale to deplete.

However, for collaboration between the different marketing teams to work efficiently, you need to invest in systems that can improve internal workflow. The cost of poor communication can hurt your company’s revenue, so having systems that allow you to delegate tasks to employees, work in real-time, and have a clear indication of the budgets they have to work with, can help your marketing team to work with one another, without any wasted time.

3. Production

The production line is responsible for making sure that raw materials are made into finished goods, and although it may sound simple enough, the production manager is in charge of overseeing this mathematical function so that the company can obtain as much profit as possible.

The supplier’s production line needs to be a well-oiled machine, where the production manager can collaborate with their business customers to ensure the materials and goods are plentiful, all while reducing costs. For the business customer, the best way to ensure the procurement communication between itself and the supply chain is efficient is to invest in an Omnia SAP Supplier Portal, such as those provided by omniaecommerce.com. An Omnia SAP Supplier Portal is an innovative solution that helps centralise your data, where both the business customer and supplier can work with real-time data while reducing administrative costs and improving collaboration.

4. Finances

Like the HR department, those who work in finance can have a lot of ground to cover. With employees’ salaries to pay and invoices to process, as well as the general accounting for and controlling of the company’s overall finances, there can be a lot of tasks which companies are yet to digitalise.

If your finance department is still processing payments manually or, worse yet, working with paper invoices, then they need to digitalise these processes by investing in e-invoicing and e-payment systems.