As the economic climate continues to make life hard for businesses of all sizes, more options for cost reductions have been explored. This often leads to an industry-wide ripple effect as more businesses catch on to innovative ideas. For less fortunate businesses, what they identified to be a potential cost saving opportunity can turn out to achieve the exact opposite, and plunge them into greater debt.
Here are a few of the ways businesses have changed the way that they operate to make savings:
Contact Centre Outsourcing – When this idea was first introduced it wasn’t popular, with many people seeing this as taking jobs out of the country. In many cases, this is how outsourcing has worked successfully, but at the time it was a huge gamble. A large investment was put into assessing the practicalities of outsourcing a call centre to an offshore location such as India, and if it had not have worked, then the first companies to explore this opportunity could have faced severe financial implications. There are a lot of other opportunities for outsourcing work.
Changing locations – Improved transport networks and technology has enabled many companies to look at moving their office/factory locations from their traditional home to places that offer either cheaper premises or cheaper workforces. In the UK many big businesses have transferred their main bases at the expense of London to the significantly cheaper northern cities.
There are numerous saving opportunities in America, such as NAPS covers the IMMEX Program, which the manufacturing industry has greatly capitalized on.
By setting up manufacturing bases in Mexico, large savings are made in comparison to running the same operation from other areas in America.
Using software productively – If you have a large number of staff with relatively low skill levels in terms of software usage, it could work out cheaper to give them extra training sessions on how to use everyday software more efficiently. If a person is wasting time with manual inputs when a program is capable of completing the tasks in a second, this is a significant amount of lost time. Upskilling a workforce can cut down the amount of time wasted.
Employee feedback processes – Many companies will make decisions from the top down, meaning that the people who are mostly involved in the company procedures that are under improvement are not involved in the decision-making process. Introducing methods for employees to send feedback to make process improvements can lead to the biggest savings of all.
Automation – One of the biggest cost saving sources for businesses is process automation. Over the last few years, new methods of automating tasks have been made possible by technology experts, and this method of cost saving looks to continue expanding. Manual labour costs have been saved by many companies who have paid relatively small installation costs, and then benefited from huge long-term savings. Examples include telephony automation systems, email automated responses, and many, many more successful automation.
The future of innovative technology looks like it will continue to provide businesses with huge cost savings through new and improved ways of working.
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