“Digitization is the topic of the future” – you have certainly heard this statement or buzzwords like “Industry 4.0” in one way or another and asked yourself what that means for you and your company. Well, on closer inspection, things are not quite as complicated as they might seem at first glance.
First of all, it has to be said that there is no such thing as “digitization”, but that the degree of digitization can be precisely adapted to the needs of the respective company. An IT-supported optimization of your work can also initially be implemented in a sub-area, e.g. order management or vacation planning, without immediately “pulling the entire operation inside out”.
Example order management, smartphones and image processing
During the first visit to the customer, the craftsman takes photos of the planned construction or repair work with his smartphone. These are saved with the customer name and date and immediately uploaded to an in-house cloud. A project can be automatically created there in the form of a folder for this order, in which all order-related data and documents are collected. All employees with the appropriate authorization can access the project data at any time and change or add to it, from a PC or laptop or even from a smartphone. (Read-only permissions can also be granted.) Incoming invoices from suppliers can also be managed on an order-related basis. You can read a description of how automated work steps can be triggered here.
Presentation of the project documents, images etc. in the Office365 cloud
Example vacation planning
An employee fills out a vacation request in a form available on the Internet on SharePoint Online. The person who must approve this request is already entered in a mandatory field and will be automatically informed of the request by email. She can approve or reject the request from the e-mail, and the employee is informed, also by e-mail.
The workflow improvements described here do not require large investments in hardware or software. With Office 365 and SharePoint Online you are well positioned, and the possibility of renting licenses at a fixed price per user and month means that the costs incurred can be easily scaled.
We would be happy to advise you on how to tackle digitization in your company and take the time to get to know you and your business in order to decide together with you what you need and which steps should be tackled.