#5 – Upgrade Technology for Better R.O.I. Through Lower Cost and Higher Productivity
Every day, we see that as time progresses, technology advances and becomes more powerful. We are at a point today where we see adoption of new technologies driving immediate performance improvements, significantly reducing the cost of operating. We see evidence of this in the reduced cost of fuel and maintenance for electric & electric-hybrid vehicles. We’ve seen a particularly profound example of this in the energy sector, where solar paneling can generate enough energy that excess is sold back to the power company, turning one of the most necessary cost centers into a profit center. All around, technologies are constantly emerging that allow us to accomplish more with what we have. As we look toward the near future, and how international responses have impacted business, we must be conscientious of looking at ways in which updating older technology will allow us to either significantly improve our productivity or significantly decrease our expenses.
The most common example experienced right now is finding out that your firewall or VPN concentrator does not handle as many concurrent sessions as you require for the sudden increase of remote workers. Many companies are reflexively responding by simply buying more licenses to allow more concurrent sessions. However, this response leaves the Firewall/concentrator as a point of risk/waste for the future, whether through having more licenses than are truly needed in the long run, or by being a physical choke point requiring maintenance. This might be the most optimal configuration for your organization, but you should first be evaluating whether network connectivity could be more easily managed on a long-term basis with an SDWAN solution, or if offloading servers and file shares to a cloud environment would allow remote users to have quicker access while not bogging down office resources. Similarly, in light of the unclear impacts we have yet to see to supply and demand, does your communication platform allow your teams to communicate effortlessly when focused on adapting to market changes? Or, even at the more fundamental level, do you really need/want to lock your liquidity into permanent CAPEX purchases, or would you be better served with the option of a subscription services that will allow you to scale up and down as you need to?
This technique is often times thought to be harder to generate an answer from than others, as there is a soft component in the measurement of productivity. Rather than leave these to “gut feeling,” we recommend calculating out what your total daily payroll costs are, and breaking those down to the hour and even minute. Then, quantify how many minutes, hours, or days are spent being unproductive because of old technology. How many minutes do people wait each day for websites to load because of low bandwidth? How much is it really costing you when your server gets overloaded for only 2 hours every work day? Would it cost you more than that to have a virtual server you can spin up in a few minutes and run for only 2 hours a day?
Can you implement a solution using newer technology for the amount you’re spending (or even losing) on current processes and behavior? If so, then that is another opportunity to remove wasteful spending.
These are complex questions and if you want the benefit but don’t have the time feel free to reach out for help.
