Business Tip 20
Avoid the Cut and Paste Along with Other Waste

Back to the Basics

Bailouts, tax increases and a deepening recession. With the current economic crisis it is more important than ever for companies to work on improving their business processes. While no one can make a solid prediction on where the economy is headed, companies can improve their bottom line by heading back to the basics and eliminating wasteful processes. The key to moving forward and staying competitive is to streamline and make workloads more efficient.

How Many Hours Did I Really Just Spend?

How many times have you worked on a presentation and thought “How can I do this faster?” If you are like most category managers a lot of time is spent building and rebuilding Microsoft PowerPoint decks. Or on the tedious and time consuming tasks of copying and pasting charts from Excel into PowerPoint or re-formatting charts with the correct data. Instead of focusing on revenue generating initiatives, category managers and analysts must often spend days recreating slides and presentation decks unique to each retailer.

Remove the Manual Work

Technology has made our lives easier and more efficient day in and day out. Imagine 10-15 years ago when your sales staff did without portable laptops. The time savings that portable computers provided were instrumental in alleviating volumes of workloads and increasing profits companywide everywhere. Today, the mobility of computers is now at your fingertips in the form of Blackberry devices, PDA’s and Palm technology phones. Many of us struggle to remember how we ever did work without these modern devices in our lives.

Instrumental to these technologies are software applications and add-ins that increase the efficiency and power of the machines. Specific software applications have been developed to address these major pain points within the category management field.

Organizations like Interactive Edge have created unique fact-based, data-driven presentation tools that alleviate many of these time consuming tasks and allows category managers and sales teams to get back to the very basics of your organization, which is to sell more product. Instead of building and rebuilding PowerPoint decks, let automation processes and presentation bursting do the work for you, allowing you to spend more time conducting analysis for the next business review. Avoid the copying and pasting and switching back and forth of applications and look for a software add-in that incorporates Excel charting within Microsoft PowerPoint. For added capability, empower your sales team with presentations that allow them to drill directly into PowerPoint.

For improved efficiency look at ways in which technology can be used to increase productivity. Investing in technology, and especially automated business processes, is particularly important in improving your bottom line.