How to cut costs

Few companies and industries have been left unaffected by the economic downturn of the past months. Everyone is focusing on cutting costs, but not everyone has really sat down and thought through where the big savings are to be made.

What’s your biggest cost centre? Almost certainly your employees. How do they work? More than likely they’re sitting behind a computer all day every day. How much time are they wasting?

I don’t mean “wasting” in the sense of reading the news online, I mean, how much time are they spending waiting for their computer to react, or for their applications to respond? This time might not seem significant – what’s twenty or thirty seconds a few times a day? – but what this delay also represents is a switch in concentration and a loss of focus. Get them a faster PC: 2GB of memory should be the minimum standard in your organization, and this will cost you a mighty 20 euro per workstation, or thereabouts, plus ten minutes per PC to carry out the upgrade. You’ll probably see significant improvements immediately and you’ll certainly make your employees happier.

That’s the easy fix. What else is there? Which processes do you have that are slow? Which operations are you still doing manually? How much time do you spend wrestling with spreadsheets? Sit down and figure out how many people are working like this, how often, and how long it takes them. Multiply that figure by what each worker is costing you per hour.

Now, figure out how much you’d save if those processes were 25-50% faster. When you’ve done that, consider getting in touch with 360Data. It could just be your next big cost-saving exercise in a year where every cent counts.

Contact details are here.