Author: Yashveer Ramparsad
Publish Date: 12/06/2020
The World Moving Forward ...
As we try to regain some semblance of our past lives post this #lockdown (its not fully over yet, as at the time of writing South Africa is still on level 3), we need to think how now do businesses and people move forward from this. If anything the past has taught us, is that from these times often comes great game changers to the market. Some examples of these, since the last great recession (2008) are Slack, Pinterest, Uber and even Groupon (although as we know, this has since faded away). What is the current status of things? Currently with a fair amount of companies working from home, or restrictions placed at the office these new business operations models sees a vast need for support to enable efficient working from home.
The aforementioned tools have seen a vast rise in cloud activity. Coming from the managed space of development, I know first hand the valuable tool sets that have enabled us to navigate this time. For interest Teams, JIRA, Slack and Confluence are the tools for product management, tracking and communication. Performing tasks and their statuses can therefore be relayed efficiently and more and more businesses are seeing the value of transitioning to this type of environment. Less travel time, less office stress, a familiar space to work in, no offices to rent and upkeep, its certainly a win-win for all involved. Now this is all well for the "typical" work environment, but what of the other industries, what are they doing to navigate these dark times.
Nothing ventured, Nothing Gained?
For a long time other industries might have viewed technology with disdain or did not even consider how it could improve on any process they are currently undertaking. However, during these harsh times, are they looking at this more now? Business automation is making the tasks that are tedious to handle simpler and faster, thereby saving you time and effort. Spending time on the Google sheets pages for your business ? There's really an easy to setup workflow for it. Invoicing? There's an app for that. Tired of signing documents all day this too can be automated. Business automation then is something that can remove the human element and more efficiently perform a task whilst freeing the users time to concentrate on other matters.
Let us take an example of how automation can help a restaurant booking system. Now typically, patrons call in to restaurants and request a booking, the concierge will answer, have look at the bookings and mark it down if available.
With an online booking system, the patron will be able to bypass the call and view the restaurant calendar live and perform the steps on their own in a seamless process. A confirmation of sorts will be sent to the patron and an entry into the restaurant system will be made. As mentioned previously, this then frees up the time of the concierge to handle other matters (this is already been taken up by many restaurants using the Nightsbridge system)
There are many more examples of how processes can be tweaked with technology (off the top of my head) :
- WhatsApp order bots
- integrated real time stock management
- automated entry system
- keyless entry system (yes good bye door knob)
- removing the need to touch items all together (here's looking at you Covid 19)
Anyway each of those deserves its own conversations.
Yes top tier companies are leveraging technology to drive their businesses forward, but honestly everyone should be. Now is not the time for conventional wisdom rather, its a time to explore possibilities.
Till the time that the world decides to get back to normalcy, will we be in the same business environment as before? It's difficult to say, what can be said though is that looking to technology to help in areas that were never thought about before could be an advantage coming out of this dark era.
As always if you need to talk about this topic or even want to try any of the weird ideas in your head, send me a message. Will be glad to help. But for now this is Yashveer Ramparsad signing out, Cheers.