Business Tip 17
The Economics of Budget Conscious Category Management

Despite plans of bailouts and promises of economic resurgence, most companies are tightening their belts to brace themselves for the bottoming out of these unstable economic times. Left and right, businesses are slashing costs, decreasing workforces and implementing spending freezes. Now companies are forced to examine costs with a fine comb and run more efficiently.

Much like many things in life, money is always involved, and companies are forced to chalk up some sort of financial cost to push their company ahead of the competition. Therefore, spending money to make money should be revised to “you need to spend money wisely to make money.” Anyone can throw money at a particular promotion and hope for the best, but like any good business investment, there needs to be thoughtful planning, research and analysis. What happens though when time and budgets do not allow for this level of precaution? The trick is to invest in time saving technologies that will allow you to do the same amount of work with fewer employees while not compromising the quality of work.

Let Technology Do the Work for You

Technology has always been feared and revered at the same time throughout the years, but without many emerging technologies, companies would struggle to balance their large workloads throughout the business day. Advances in technologies like cellular phones, laptop computers and even your favorite mp3 player have all made your days more manageable. Today, technologies exist to help run your daily tasks faster, more efficiently and more error free. Companies, such as Interactive Edge, have built innovative business intelligence tools that not only save you time, they save you money. Now that’s music to any company’s ears.

Imagine doing one of your most time consuming tasks of the day such as creating Microsoft PowerPoint decks. Companies understand that this is one of the most tedious and time intensive daily routines for employees, yet it is essential to build eye-catching, analytical presentations to showcase data. There are now tools out there, such as XP3, which save exponential amounts of time in both creating PowerPoint decks and generating multiple presentations at a fraction of the time and cost.

Besides being a time and money saver, technology also removes a large portion of “human error.” Everyone can think of a moment where something was copied and pasted incorrectly in PowerPoint from Excel, or where calculations of specific sales numbers were off due to a human miscalculation. Technology more often than not helps alleviate and nearly eliminates human error. Tools such as XP3 Data Loader allow companies to directly load their data easily and connect directly to Microsoft PowerPoint. By doing this, companies eliminate the need to copy and paste from Excel; instead charts are embedded within PowerPoint. Also, instead of relying on figuring out Excel calculations, or even doing them by hand, XP3 does all of the calculations for you, even custom calculations unique to your business.

Example of XP3's Value Proposition - Actual Results from a Fortune 500 Global Manufacturer

Saving Jobs by Increasing Worker Efficiency

Even though companies are trimming the fat these days to prepare for the inevitable economic slumps, technology can be a saving grace for most businesses. Instead of removing people from the organization, there is now a better option -- the option of utilizing technology to decrease time spent on manual tasks, which saves money and also increases the overall efficiency of the workforce therefore resulting in better profits. The bottom line reality is that people are being let go by companies across the board, yet the work will never diminish, it will only increase for those that remain and this is where technologies like XP3 can save the day. By making everyone within the organization more productive and more efficient, it will alleviate the burden of having fewer people “doing more with less.”