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No matter how much money your company makes, it’s always nice to know how you can reduce business expenses. There is a myriad of cost-cutting strategies you can experiment with such as outsourcing, tax optimization, changing marketing strategy or HR policy. All those may work or not, but what will definitely make a difference is an implementation of new technologies.
And it doesn’t matter whether your company is small, medium or large and in what business area it operates, by developing custom software you can reduce business expenses in any instance.
In this article, we’ll explain what types of business optimization tools promoting the reduction of expenses exist and share some success stories experienced by other companies.
Software solutions for cost reduction
Let’s start with the overview of top tech solutions for business your company may benefit from.
Financial management tools. As the name suggests, this kind of applications helps manage company’s finances. Specifically, they automate financial planning, accounting, management of cash flows, invoice tracking, payroll and payment of taxes.
Financial software usually uploads information from a company’s bank account, PayPal and other payment systems making it possible to see a company’s overall financial state. In some instances, this software is integrated with reporting tools, so it also may automatically file financial, tax and employment reports with the state authorities.
Custom financial software development facilitates business cost reduction by downturning administrative resources needed to maintain the financial health of a company. They also simplify a decision-making process for company’s top management since it becomes easy to see how business is doing in general at any time. Another more indirect way in which these digital products may save your money is the minimization of chances for human error.
Business process management software. Amongst all cost-saving measures, business-management tools can bring the most comprehensive result. It is not only a great cost-cutting solution, this kind of software also improves the efficiency of all business processes occurring in a company.
In short, business process management tools map, optimize, automate and analyze a company’s business activity.
How can a business reduce costs by using it? The answer is quite straightforward. It allows you to see the big picture of how a company operates. This helps timely identify all existing and potential blockages so there are no any non-working processes which consume a lot of financial resources. It’s also a useful tool assisting company’s management in defining possibilities for improvements which may potentially lead to the increase in revenue.
CRM System. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Simply put, CRM tools help manage company’s interactions with customers–both actual and potential. In particular, this software collects and records all available information related to a customer such as contacts, news, previous communications etc.
CRM tools are used by different departments, e.g. sales, marketing teams, HR, top management etc. They allow a company to track a sales pipeline, build a marketing strategy, track employees performance and much more.
Implementation of CRM system is one of the best cost-cutting measures you may take. It helps employees to be organized and, thus, work more efficiently. Besides, CRM reduces redundant expenses on marketing campaigns since it allows a marketing department to target their efforts better and, thus, receive more leads at the same or even lower cost. Another benefit is that CRM tools make it possible for a company to go paperless which is not only is a good cost-saving initiative but also improves company’s social responsibility.
By the way, while any business may benefit from the implementation of CRM system, it proved to be one of the best cost reduction strategies for manufacturing industry since it promotes faster close of the deals by providing sales teams with real data about customers.
Administrative tools. These include all web solutions which assist the company’s staff in dealing with their day-to-day administrative tasks such as planning, scheduling, project management, time management and documenting.
All administrative tools have a common task–to help a business reach its top level of performance and productivity. Such software allows company’s management and employees to perform better by saving the time that they spend on administrative work. And since time is money in the business world, by implementing administrative tools a company reduces its business costs.
When opting for any of the above types of cost-cutting solutions, a company can either use third-party services and integrate them with its existing IT infrastructure or go for the development of a custom web product. We recommend choosing the second alternative whenever possible since custom software can be better suited to your company’s specific needs.
Mini case study: saving costs with web products
Now let’s look at some stories of companies that already found their ways to reduce costs with the help of custom software.
Document management tool for AgustaWestland
AgustaWestland (now Leonardo Helicopters) is a large aerospace company located in Italy. It manufactures and repairs helicopters but the problem it experienced may be familiar to any business: the extensive amount of documentation was slowing down the work and the company wasn’t able to render services as quickly as clients needed it. Each spare part comes with a lot of documents, so the issue was that employees could not develop new documents required to repair helicopters in a timely manner.
To solve the problem, AgustaWestland decided to use new technologies and went for the development of custom software that deals with everything related to paperwork: scanning, attaching metadata, loading documents into the management system etc. According to the company’s Head of Material Service Delivery, a new system not only reduced document search time by 80% but also appeared to be more cost-effective than the previous process.
Customer engagement platform for Nespresso
Nespresso is a coffee company based in Switzerland. It was doing pretty well but to win new customers it had to keep up with the demands of the new digitized world.
The solution was quite innovative: Nespresso simplified a buying process by building a customer engagement platform. Such platform handles the entire buying cycle from pricing to orders by connecting all kinds of data across every touch. This gave the company better insights about its customers, their behavior and intentions. As a result, Nespresso was able to allocate its marketing costs better and the sales increased drastically. The company is still growing despite the fact the competition on the coffee market is quite harsh nowadays.
Visual roadmap tool for the Altamira’s client
A variety of complex and interesting projects is a dream for every company. Yet, if a project is too complicated it is really difficult for team members to grasp it as a whole. And if there are many such projects, organizing the workflow becomes a nightmare. That was a problem the Altamira’s client faced each day so they needed something that would allow them to manage hundreds of tasks in a simple but efficient way.
Visual roadmap tool was built by Altamira to help the company overcome this challenge. The tool makes it possible to easily visualize the project roadmap and share it with different teams (sales, marketing, production, etc.), stakeholders and customers. Core functions of Visual roadmap tool include: roadmapping and roadmap sharing, task creation, dependencies creation, team members assignment, commenting, setting goals & deadlines, email notification. Here’s how it looks:
As a result, the solution allowed company’s teams to work more productively on the projects and this is one of the most effective ways to reduce costs for any business.
To learn more about this or other products developed by our team, see our portfolio.
Conclusion
If you are looking for cost-cutting ideas for your business, development of custom software may be your best choice. Digital products may help you simplify complex processes, streamline workflow, make the employees’ work more productively, improve your relationships with customers and overcome any other challenge that consumes your company’s money. Many businesses already took an advantage of new technologies. Ready to be next?
