April 20, 2022
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5
min read
Ever since early humans first picked up a rock to pound grain, or sharpened a piece of flint to scrape meat off a bone, we’ve been seeking ways to be more productive: to save time and energy, and make work easier so that we can accomplish more. We can’t help it — it’s in our DNA to try and do better, and look how far it’s gotten us: We’re driving cars, and sometimes letting cars drive us. We’re flying planes, sending satellites deep into space, outsourcing our memory to Google and relying on a single handheld gadget to communicate, photograph, get directions and virtually everything else. Meanwhile, in the workplace, the number of robots doing the jobs that people used to do is growing by the day.
But while robots have become pervasive in factories and distribution centers, it’s still “business as usual” in the office. Labor productivity — a measure of output per hour worked — was in a slump in the years before COVID-19 hit. During the pandemic, it recorded a significant rise, partly because low productivity workers lost their jobs. But economists predict that it could continue at a brisk pace in the years ahead as long as more companies follow the example of firms that quickly adapted to the changing circumstances by streamlining processes and innovating to meet demand. The startling increase in labor and material costs we’ve seen in the wake of the pandemic — in 2021 alone, construction materials were up nearly 25% — make it essential that companies find new efficiencies to offset rising prices and new ways to grow besides adding to payroll.
Every new technology is rolled out to a chorus of naysayers. Everything from nail polish to talking pictures to the Internet and laptop computers have been viewed as passing fads. “Get a horse!” was the famous taunt hurled at early adopters of the automobile. Early in this century, another technology had its share of skeptics early on: Software designed to manage and simplify a business’s customer contacts, commonly known as Customer Relationship Management. Twenty years ago, an article in Harvard Business Review declared: “The promise of customer relationship management is captivating, but in practice it can be perilous.” Yet these days, cloud-based CRM is a staple and Salesforce is a $200B company, which shows just how fast our dependency on software has grown in two decades.
We now have cloud-based tools for virtually every business consideration imaginable: sales, marketing, finance/accounting, production, service, etc. What does this mean?
And yet, many companies still rely on email, spreadsheets, shared drives and Post-It notes to move business projects along. Enter Vsimple and its eponymous platform for simplifying, standardizing and centralizing workflows. The Vsimple team sits alongside its customers to understand processes and standard operating procedures, then customizes its technology to bring these workflows together with communication, collaboration, process governance, document management and creation, customer experience and data analytics in one place. It's ready in days, easy to use and highly economical.
The results of Vsimple’s application in businesses of all kinds has been remarkable, with reports of 35%+ efficiency gains and 65%+ reduction in email traffic. On top of that, big name customers such as Toyota are extolling the value of reducing errors, safeguarding institutional knowledge and delivering insights not just about what gets done every day, but what it took to do it.
Most businesses already employ some combination of the Microsoft Office suite for tasks, a CRM for customer data and an ERP for inventory and financials. Vsimple represents the fourth place: your operational workspace where processes can be managed from start to finish. No guessing what has happened, who owns the next action, where the relevant information lives or what performance looks like across the business. Your employees will appreciate the clarity and ease of use while leadership enjoys deep insights about previously opaque performance data.
Vsimple is ushering in a new era of work, and the office will never look the same…especially once the filing cabinets are finally retired.