Over the last 25 years in Canada, we’ve learned a lot from Canadian business owners. Most of you employ 50 or fewer employees. Most of you are working long hours, and wear several hats in your company. Most of you have enough to worry about before even thinking about IT.
We’ve also learned that there are a few common ‘nice to have’ problems that arise when your business start growing. The need to innovate and stay competitive. Balancing a remote workforce with required office space. Attracting and retaining talent. Managing data. Meeting customer expectations and managing your supply chain.
Sound familiar?
Read a bit about each business problem below. You’ll find the solutions at http://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_ca/articles/5-nice-problems-to-have.html.
Business Problem #1: Staying innovative
Innovation is the word on everyone’s lips these days, and the term is used (almost ad nauseam) to describe how companies are changing their industry’s landscape. But what is innovation? To me, it simply means that a company is constantly trying and testing new ideas and ways of working. So how do you enable your employees to ideate and share at any time, from anywhere, on every device?
Business Problem #2: Retaining and attracting the best workforce
Digital businesses – which every business will be, eventually – need to be able to support multi-generational workforces. As your business grows, you need to bring in more employees to service customers. Those employees will likely be millennials, who are challenging our perception of how to work and communicate and are constantly reimagining how to use technology. They value flexibility over compensation and expect the technology in their workplace to be as intuitive as their mobile device. Your business needs to cater to different work styles and cultures, or risk losing talent to competitors.
Business Problem #3: Moving office and upgrading
Balancing an increasingly remote workforce with required office space is a common problem as businesses expand. The key is to evaluate your current space and the ways people interact and work within it, then you can make some smart changes for the future. This involves more than updating furniture, lowering cubicle walls, and putting bright colours on the walls (especially if you planning a move to a larger space).
Business Problem #4: Making sense of customer data
As more and more devices get connected, companies have the potential to connect to and collect data from every device, piece of equipment, and asset. For growing businesses, the struggle lies in knowing you should be using this data but lacking the ability to actually do it. This is largely because ‘big data’ seems just that – big. It’s too large to wrap your head around. And that’s before you even start to think about applying sensors or providing guest Wi-Fi access.
Business Problem #5: Supply chain
Supply chain complexity seems to go hand-in-hand with business growth. When your business is small, organizing your supply chain is usually straightforward. You probably buy from a handful of suppliers, know exactly who your customers are, and what and roughly when those customers will buy. Delivering goods or services to them is, relatively speaking, easy to keep track of.
But as your business grows, the work involved in managing buying, logistics, and servicing customers expands as well. What was once a case of simply noticing you were running low on a specific part and ordering more from the manufacturer is no longer so simple. So what happens now?
Let us show you a better way to work.
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