Waste is a thief. And in today’s fast paced and ultra-competitive business climate, it’s a thief that no enterprise can afford to allow on the premises. Whatever the size or scope of your business, as an entrepreneur you abhor waste with every fiber of your being.

Whether it's wasted time, wasted talent or wasted resources, every instance of waste can create a barrier between your business and profitability. Fortunately, as in all things, the world of digital technology can come to your aid here. 

Whether through digital applications or digitally enabled hardware there are a multitude of ways in which businesses can drive efficiency, eliminate waste and improve employee productivity. Here we’ll look at 4 key instances in which digital technology boosts efficiency in business...

Time and resource management

It can keep business owners up at night wondering whether or not they got the most out of their team or whether or not their resources were used efficiently.

Until relatively recently, the business of project management was relatively clumsy and inefficient, making it hard for business owners to get a bead on how their employees are using their time and resources without resorting to micromanagement.

Today, however, a wealth of project management apps allow business owners and project managers to assert granular control over how time and resources are used, allowing them to delegate tasks, communicate and receive updates in real time. 

Ensuring precision

Precision is a business’ greatest asset in mitigating waste. And digital technologies can aid in helping businesses to deliver to-the-micron precision in weighs that analogue technologies simply cannot. Digital load cells are a great example of this.

With a range of applications for precision weighing they have a variety of clear advantages over their analogie counterparts. 

Turning data into actionable insights

We live (and work) in the age of Big Data. The trouble is that all that data can get… a little too big. Collecting data is fairly easy. Making sense of it is harder. Converting it into meaningful and actionable insights is harder still.

Fortunately, the new generation of AI-driven Business Intelligence software is designed to help businesses leverage huge volumes of data and mine it for tangible and actionable insights from which informed and effective business strategies can be formed. 

Investing in new technologies can prevent your business from drowning in data and help you to remain agile, giving you the inside track over your competitors. 

Creating frictionless customer experiences

For today’s consumer convenience is no longer a novelty, it’s an expectation. And in an age where they know that they can be fickle, they are unlikely to waste their time on brands that represent the slightest friction in any aspect of the research or purchase phases of a transaction.

The rise of the bespoke business app industry, however, has proven a massive boon in delivering a frictionless customer experience, allowing them to educate and inform themselves at their convenience before either making purchases in-app or making an in-store purchase. 

In the 2020s we can expect digital technologies to transform the business landscape even further. Just make sure you’re on the right side of history.