3 IT Improvements to Implement During Your Summer ‘Slow Season’
Summer is not far off now, and in many businesses, this can herald a slow season. You may have a smaller workforce than usual as people take their summer breaks, or may find that your clients, customers or partners have slowed down for similar reasons. Other than in businesses that actually become busier for seasonal reasons, the period when children are on their summer holidays is usually the quietest outside of Christmas. Of course, this can present some good opportunities to do all the things you want to do to improve your business, but don’t have time for during the normal running of things. Looking at your strategies can be one thing to do, but this is also the best time to implement any new IT or roll out any IT upgrades without interfering too much with ongoing work.
If you are thinking of using the July and August period in this way, then here are three IT improvements you could consider:
Add a Supplier Portal
Businesses who do a lot of B2B work can become much more streamlined, have better relationships with key suppliers, and perform better if they introduce convenient ways for their suppliers to do their most common tasks with the business. A supplier web portal makes this easy, and can be a great change to make over the summer because not only will this be a quiet time for you to implement it, your suppliers will likely also be experiencing a quiet time when being introduced to a new, better way to work with you will be welcome. Seek out a good SAP supplier portal company and you can easily get your portal up and running during your slow season.
Upgrade Operating Systems on Your Hardware
Whether you only have PCs and laptops to think about or also have a fleet of company phones and tablets, if you are running an old operating system you may see a lot of benefits to upgrading everything, but also a lot of disruption. It is this that results in so many businesses sticking to technology like Windows 7. However, over the summer you can plan an upgrade with minimal disruption and have the time your IT people need to properly prepare, roll out and test it. You can also take the time to look at things that go hand in hand with this upgrade from a strategic point of view – what do the latest desktop and mobile operating systems also allow you to change for the better?
Switch to Cloud Storage
If you aren’t already using it, cloud storage can be an incredible way to keep all your archives and other data in a way that poses no risk of losing it, even if your own hardware is all destroyed in some kind of disaster situation. It also gives you unlimited (theoretical) space so you can keep everything. Migrating files from your own servers (or even digitising paper file archives) and arranging cloud storage and back up can be a great positive IT change you can make this summer.
These are just three IT improvements you can think about arranging for your summer slow time!