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Smart Strategies for a More Effective Business

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Running a business is a difficult thing to do. It is even more difficult to do when you are not running your business as effectively as it should be. When your business processes are sub-standard, it means that you are doing more work than you need to, while at the same time producing worse results. The successful business is one that can look at itself, find its weaknesses, and work on improving them. A successful business is one that works on becoming more effective, and one that constantly strives to improve. This is particularly important with how fast new innovations and trends take hold of each and every industry. If you cannot keep up, then you fall behind.

To ensure that your company is as successive and effective as possible, adopt these smart strategies today:

Create a New Business Plan

Though you should have already created a business plan when you first started, it’s important to periodically create new reports. That way you can stay on top of trends, on changes, and can ensure that your company moves forward in the right direction. Creating a new business plan is also an excellent opportunity to analyze and reflect on your current business strategies and work on improving them.

You need to know where your weak points are if you can ever hope to succeed, which is why you should conduct a SWOT analysis as soon as possible. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and it can be vital to drafting a successful business plan. Without this analysis, you cannot move forward and you cannot fix areas that are holding you and your company back.

Improve Work Productivity

When you or your team waste too much time trying to find a document, you are being inefficient. This inefficiency means more important things are held off, that your money isn’t going towards bettering your company, and that you workforce is too slow. Instead, improve your systems to that work can be done quickly and easily. This means using management tools, and training your employees so that they use the same methods to store and retrieve data.

Other ways you can improve your productivity is to actually improve how well you treat your employees. For instance, having a great break room can actually help you improve how well they work when they are on the job. Further if you have cooking means so that your employees can bring food from home (even if it’s a ready-meal), it means that they aren’t wasting money eating out, and aren’t ruining their health with the fatty, salty foods that are available.

Other ways you can improve your employee’s productivity is to give them more incentive. When your employees see your success as theirs, they will work harder for you. Do this by making them feel valued. Give them rewards once they reach milestones, listen to their suggestions and give them genuine responses, and treat them every once in a while. Even something as simple as taking a team who has done well out for lunch can help boost morale and make your office a great place to be. The more you care about your employees, the more they will care about you.

Save Money Wherever You Can

It is a huge mistake to simply accept the first product or replacement that a supplier offers you. By rule, they will want to sell you the most expensive option they have. They want to do this because it means better business for them, but it isn’t a good way to run your business more effectively. Instead, take quotes from several suppliers or businesses, and always try to haggle down.

A great way to save money is by doing price comparisons. That way you get the best deal, even if the product is the same. That is why businesses should visit Side By Side Reviews. That way you can ensure to get the best deal.

Getting the best deal in other areas of business, however, requires a lot of cunning and negotiation. One of the best ways to do this is to be extremely effective in your networking. People help out their friends, and when you network effectively, you become friends with all the right people. Remember to be genuine, and to offer help first. You cannot expect others to do favors for you when you are not willing to do the same in return.

Build a Community

When it comes to your customers, the notion of networking remains the same. You need to be genuine, you need to have a certain “personality” and you need to give before you can hope for them to buy from you. If you don’t work on building relationships with your customers, then you are working extra hard for each and every sale.

Build a community that not only like your products or services, but who also enjoy you as a company. Many companies have seen their public image increase substantially from good PR. Have an effective enough company persona, and people will follow your social accounts for the joy of it. When that happens, you benefit from word-of-mouth, from increased SEO, and from becoming a household name.

Build a community, because when you do you have a circle of repeat customers and a circle of those who will recommend you to their friends and family. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most effective way to get new sales, because we trust our friends. In order to nurture this community, you need to provide great content and even better customer service.

How you treat your customers will dictate how well you are received, but you need to remember that customers are rather savvy; if you are a large business without any bad reviews, for instance, you are immediately suspicious. Don’t delete the negative reviews you receive, but instead respond to them in a courteous manner. This is especially important in a public forum, because it shows other potential customers how well you deal with complaints.

Being a more effective business means working better – it could even mean working less! Don’t bog your business down with inefficient policies or out-of-date practices. Reevaluate, and innovate.

How to Improve Clinic Productivity

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Many people try to increase the profit margin of their practice by cutting services, increasing costs or hoping to sell supplemental products and services to generate more money. However, increasing the productivity of your practices without similarly increasing one’s operating costs or payroll is far more effective. Here are a few tips on how to improve clinic productivity. And note that we’ll ensure that our advice stays within the regulatory requirements that often interfere with clinic efficiency.

Map Your Workflow

The workflow is both the standard flow of patients through the practice and the flow of key personnel as they go through their duties. You want to identify causes of wasted time and effort, and there has been an influx of industrial engineers and Lean experts into the healthcare field to help you do exactly that.

Little things like walking from your office to patients’ rooms instead of from room to room take up non-value added time. Putting a work desk in a central location could eliminate this waste for both doctors and nurses. Adopting electronic medical records and having tablets that can always call them up (and places to charge them and update them as necessary) can streamline operations.

Mapping the billing cycle and patient checkout process could identify wasteful steps that could be combined, or tasks that could be handled assembly line style more quickly.

Only Do Work at Your Credential Level

Physician assistants were widely adopted because their initial checks of a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, weight and other vitals saved a doctor several minutes per patient. This allowed doctors to see more patients per day. Make sure you aren’t asking doctors to do other, more mundane tasks instead of focusing on the diagnostic care only they provide. This can include sending prescriptions to the pharmacy, creating copies of informational brochures for patients, providing explanations on how to use newly prescribed inhalers and giving them information on how to connect with a referred healthcare provider.

Study your workflow to look for tasks that nurses and other staff can do like authorizing refills that don’t require a physician’s signature, or using nurse educators instead of having the doctor lecture those diagnosed with diabetes on how to live with their condition. Don’t have doctors do sonograms but instead hire techs from the best ultrasound technician schools to perform these procedures.

Set Up Patient Portals

 

Patient portals are websites where patients can view their health records, see reminders for appointments and schedule their next visit. They reduce the need to call patients to discuss test results and allows them to email questions that nurses could answer in a timely manner, or that the doctor can answer when there is free time, which is certainly a more efficient way to do things. Don’t forget to ask patients to upload critical forms like ‘do not resuscitate orders’ and medical power of attorney documents so that your staff don’t have to scramble for them in an emergency.

Improving your clinic efficiency is possible if you follow some of the tips in this article. Doing something simple as mapping your workflow or delegating things like sonography could improve your productivity instantly.

5 Ways to Keep Your Employees Safe at Work

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As a business owner, your employees are perhaps your most valuable assets. Any entrepreneur worth his salt knows that to please his customers, he must first address the happiness of his team – making sure workers are healthy, safe, and fulfilled in their roles.

When it comes to give and take, it’s not enough to provide extra holiday or bonuses to compensate hard work. As an employer, it is your duty to look after your workers, but above-par health and safety regulations will also benefit your business, so it’s worth going the extra mile. With this in mind, here are five ways to keep your employees safe at work.

Be Prepared

With the humdrum normality of everyday life in the office, it’s easy to think that your workplace is immune to danger. The reality is, none of us expect natural disasters or crime, and yet those unfortunate events still happen. The best way to protect your business is to prepare for the worst. Know that a break-in, cyber attack, or other crime could befall your workplace at any time, and have a written plan of action ready.

Follow Preventative Measures

Many people only install burglar alarms or extra locks after a burglary, so stay ahead of the game and prevent one happening in the first place. We often hear about the importance of data security, but it’s easy to forget that leaving your office building vulnerable to intruders puts real people at risk. If in doubt, contact your local law enforcement officials and ask them to run a risk assessment on your premises. Once you’re aware of your vulnerabilities, you can set about sealing the cracks in your defense.

Safeguard Your Vehicles

If your employees use vehicles for work, make sure they are regularly inspected, and that security measures are in place to protect their belongings. If you own three or more company vehicles, consider taking out fleet car insurance to reduce your overall expenses without compromising on complete coverage.

Check In With Your Employees

People are unpredictable, and you can never truly know what’s going on under the surface. Violent behavior often masquerades under a guise of normality until something provokes an outburst; so keep a close eye on each member of your team. If you run a large-scale business, make sure your managers are checking in with their employees regularly and keeping tabs on their mental health.

Follow Health and Safety Requirements

It goes without saying that you should follow health and safety requirements in your workplace, but during busy periods it’s easy to let your standards slip. Make sure your employees and managers are abiding by workplace safety rules, and arrange for regular inspections to make sure no one is cutting corners. It never hurts to be over-prepared, so talk to a workplace safety expert to ensure you have the appropriate measures in place.

Without the people who show up day after day, your business simply would not run. Therefore, it makes sense from a financial point of view (as well as a moralistic one) to keep your employees safe at work.

The Factories Of The Future… Tomorrow’s Manufacturing Tech

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The impact of the digital revolution has not just been witnessed in the computer age, but we have seen exactly what it’s beginning to do in the manufacturing and factory industries. The advent of automating certain aspects of factory line production is nothing new, but now with smarter technology, we are seeing that we are relying less on human hand to put certain aspects together. And while older businesses may still view the human hand as the key part of the manufacturing process, that’s not to say that these more established businesses can’t make the most of the technology in certain respects. So, if you think that your business could do with a little helping hand, here are some suggestions to integrate technology into your existing factory line.

Smart Products

The internet of things is a general term of how technology is being used to communicate with other systems and therefore learn from each other. The connections between systems mean that your human workers can focus on more pressing matters, it has been seen with back-office functions in specific businesses that minimal functions can be automated, such as emails and minor marketing tools. But with this in a factory setting, it can be implemented in alarm management, sensors, or the basic time management and productivity of certain areas.

Predictive Analytics

The one thing that crosses everyone’s mind when it comes to integrating technology into the factory setting is that if something fails, which inevitably it will, what happens and how to replace these items of equipment? Predictive analytics is becoming a key part of every aspect of the manufacturing industry, and it also has a main drive in how new technology can be used to increase the quality, as well as the quantity, of manufacturing products.

Virtual Reality

Yes, this can occur in manufacturing! This is now referred to either as simulation, integration, or digital design. Motion capture technology has been used by Ford to help refine their production line. And it has been used to simulate certain products, or it can be used in a practical sense, such as to help reduce the delays in time when requesting a quote from specific companies. The idea behind virtual reality now is to reduce the additional work and streamline the whole process. The customer can also see what something looks like, as well as the cost, which is lending itself well to the notion of transparency in the industry.

3d Printing

This is a major part of any manufacturing process, as scanning items in a 3d sense can be a big help to designers on how to change the product, this means that it can be altered to please the customer. A good example would be clothing, whereas you would have to go back and request an item of clothing be altered, with 3d printing, this wouldn’t be the case, saving the customer time, as well as the business.

In thinking about the best ways to press on in the manufacturing industry without compromising your human workforce, these would be a very handy addition to any factory.

How to Ensure Your Employees Have an Easy Website Management Experience

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If you’re a growing business and your employees help manage the website from time to time, it’s crucial their experience is as easy as possible to keep productivity at its highest. You may well have the experience and knowledge to manage the website, but your employees may struggle if they don’t have any prior website management experience. If you’re looking to ensure your employees have an easy ride, try to implement the following tips.

Consider Changing the Platform

All CMS’s (Content Management Systems) are there to do the job of making website management easy, but some of them are better at doing it than others. You only have to look as far as WordPress to see why it’s so popular, and that’s because it provides a simple experience for experienced and newbie website managers. If your platform is a bit too complex, consider making a change to improve efficiency. Granted, it’s a drastic measure to take to make website management easier, but it’s a measure your employees will appreciate. The WordPress CMS won’t only make management easy but it also comes with many plugins that could improve the experience for your customers.

Create a Training Program

If completely changing the platform isn’t a viable option, creating a training program for your employees to learn from is an effective way to help them learn the platform you already have in place. It’ll take a lot of time and patience to implement, but it will pay dividends in the future when you have a solid training program in place that your employees will thrive from. You could, for example, have five stages of training and for each one that an employee passes, reward them with a small salary increase.

Change Web Hosts

Web hosting providers offer different features and packages for those who’re less experienced at managing websites. This might not benefit you as such, but it could benefit your employees. For example, if employees need to create new email accounts or MySQL databases for whatever reason, many web hosts will have many resources on their own websites that they can use to help them. The processes might be simple for us, but someone who doesn’t have any web development experience might struggle. If you’re looking for a top web host, consider researching them by using hostingkingdom.com.

Point them in the Right Direction

One of the most effective ways of helping your employees learn the system is to simply sit down with them and show them what’s what. You don’t need a training program for this; you just need to be able to spare some time until they’re confident enough to do things on their own.

Whichever method you choose to implement to help your employees, you can ensure it’s going to be a long learning curve. However, if you’re willing to implement one of the above methods, your employees will thrive from the learning experience and you’ll have one more person who can handle website affairs without taking up any of your time.