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We tend to lose time in small amounts, but it’s when this accumulates and you add it up, that it has a major impact on your business. Is it TIME to look at a better way of managing your office?
Here are 6 tips on how to ensure that your office equipment doesn’t steal your time, so you can get the ball rolling and start thinking more strategically about time, so you won’t regret it making the changes.
Total Cost of Management: Invest in good quality office equipment from printers, copiers, scanners, shredders and they’ll save you an inordinate amount of time. They won’t break down as often, as they have more sophisticated and superior software. Is your time and your team’s time better spent activating company strategy, being a trusted advisor to clients, working on billables, or fixing printers and stopping productivity for shredders that overheat, as an example? If I were a betting woman, I’d say that most businesses would prefer to focus on their business and not on their office equipment.
Do The Demo: We always suggest that clients come to do demos of new printers and scanners, but it doesn’t cease to amaze me how it’s not taken up as an option and seen as an opportunity. Think about it: taking in a new printer or MFD is a large capital investment and yet so little time is put into making an informed and accurate decision that will most definitely have a very substantial impact on the business. Think about it: will the wrong printer negatively impact on your brand integrity, productivity, costs, time management? Isn’t it worth doing a little bit more research to ultimately save a lot of time…and if time is money, why would you waste it, by not doing the correct due diligence?
Invest in Training: Ensure that your office has a super user or a number of super users who are trained to use the new office equipment inside out, who know how to programme, trouble-shoot, develop workflows and who can train any new staff coming into your company. This is mission critical, as everything you do in your business will somehow pass through your printer, scanner, fax or copier, so it’s a core hub and central connector to your office’s productivity, which ultimately drives your business. Invest time to learn how to use the new office equipment to best effect for YOUR business, as it’s different for different verticals, i.e. a solicitor doesn’t have the same needs as the accountant!
Choose the Right Partner: Having the right partner is always key. Would you like to know that if something breaks down, that you’ll have a service engineer with you in a matter of hours to fix the problem? Would that give you and your business peace of mind? Our standard at Highline Office Technology is #ServiceExcellence, so we guarantee to keep your business powered, and up and running.
Streamline Your Kit: If you have multiple different printers and brands, then this means you are probably dealing with a number of companies, so try to streamline this to one company, so you have less people to deal with. Having a Managed Print Solution for your office is key to saving time, so if you are changing out any printers, try to get any other fleet of printers managed by the one provider to make it simpler for you. This will have a knock on effect, as you’ll get one bill or invoice to process, so less time taken up by your bookkeeper to cross check and audit your bills, and it’ll help manage your cashflow as well.
Invest in Software: eCopy is a great piece of software that can help with file conversion, e.g. pdf to excel (great for accountants and bookkeepers who would like to convert the bank statement and visa statement straight into excel!) or pdf to word, file mark up, compare and contrast – great for solicitors who need to compare contracts at the click of a button to see what changes have been made. Pdf to a .wav file or more commonly known as an audio file – great for solicitors who don’t have so much time to read case files and could listen to them instead on the train or in their car! How much time would that save?
eCopy comes as standard with Canon scanners and can be bought on a user licence basis when getting a new multi-functional device for your office. eCopy can be set up and aligned for most brands of printers and copiers, so if you’ve an Olivetti, Epson or Canon printer/MFD, then this can be incorporated into your office environment without too much hassle. Canon’s Therefore software can assist with document management solutions. Most offices are changing how they operate. There is more scanning, a drive to have a paperless or paper lite office… but this can only be achieved if the software and technology is embraced and brought into the office to allow it to become more efficient.
Do you know the average worker spends one full day per week storing documents, trying to find them again and searching for emails someone has sent them? So what if you could scan your documents straight into your filing system and documents were digitized (OCRed – optical character recognition) for fast retrieval? Would this help drive productivity and better manage your team’s time?
There is no doubt that times are changing and we need to be wiser and smarter in how we manage our own time. The technology and software that is available can do just that, so it’s worth spending a bit of that precious time at the start, in order to gain a lot of time in the long run!
Article supplied by Highline Office Technology