,“Innovations are the pulse of technological evolution." And the new year can be a catalyst for your progress. This (literally) groundbreaking moment presents an ideal opportunity to start anew. To set personal and professional goals, outline visions, and draw new inspiration. The new year is also an ideal opportunity to recap your company's performance and propose plans for improvement.  

In today's world, it is essential to utilize modern technologies that will help you increase efficiency, quality, and competitiveness. That's why we have prepared trends for the coming year that you cannot afford to ignore. Why? Their integration will accelerate your company, improve customer and employee satisfaction, and help you achieve your business goals for 2024. And that's hard to refuse.

Content

• First step – digitization of records
• Look at your processes.
• Intranet – Your Company's Central Hub
• Onboarding and offboarding employees
• Automation is worth more than gold 
• Cybersecurity
• AI Integration
• Ask employees for their opinion
• Cutting corners on digitization will cost you dearly 
• Final advice   

Digitization of records 

The first New Year's resolution is something you may have noticed that we repeat over and over again because we are convinced it's the key to success: DIGITALIZATION. 

Moving to digital records will allow you to save time and space, ensure better protection and availability of your data, simplify and speed up communication, collaboration, and improve the transparency and accessibility of your company's important records.  

How about this? For digitizing records, you can use cloud-based document management solutions like Microsoft SharePoint. If you're just starting with digitization, OneDrive will also suffice. Digitizing records of orders, tasks, documents, and lists specific to your business will help the company progress faster and distribute information more effectively within the team.   

Key Process Analysis 

Have you ever asked yourself what the foundation of your business is? It's your processes. Therefore, it is essential that you continuously monitor and improve them. Analyze your key processes and identify where the company's weaknesses are, where waste occurs, what unnecessary mistakes to avoid, and how to find opportunities that will move you forward. This way, you will increase efficiency and productivity, quality and satisfaction, and last but not least, competitiveness and innovation.  

You can use various methods to analyze key processes, such as process mapping and then integrating them into your business applications. How is your sales process? What process do you use for order execution? How do employees access process systems? Are they accessible from mobile? Proper analysis of your processes and their incorporation into a user-friendly business application will move your company forward by leaps and bounds.

Create one “place of truth"

Everything under one roof. Eliminate chaos and provide employees with company news, documents, and the ability to communicate with other employees in a single location. This “single source of truth" will help you improve the quality and integrity of information, the availability and accessibility of your data, and accelerate your teams' analytical, decision-making, and communication capabilities.  

Do you know what the most valuable commodity is? Your data. It is a valuable source of information that helps you in making decisions and managing your business. Therefore, it is important that you create a single “place of truth," which means a single intranet or source database, that will contain all your important data and will be constantly updated and synchronized with all your applications and systems.  

,Your company's “source of truth“ could be Microsoft Teams, for example. You can quickly and easily integrate various applications into Teams, including SharePoint, which is ideal for sharing news, regulations, or project updates. It's also the perfect place for filling out forms or for a clear overview of orders, projects, and documents. And the best part? Employees can keep the window open, communicate, or search for information and files without constant clicking back and forth. A company intranet as a "source of truth" will provide everyone in your company with clarity and eliminate office gossip during smoke breaks.

Enhance employee onboarding and offboarding 

First and foremost, clarify what your company's most important asset is. Or rather, who. It's your valuable employees. Therefore, it's important that you provide them with an optimal start and end to their employment. Improve onboarding and offboarding, and thereby increase your employees' motivation, loyalty, and performance. You will also reduce turnover, costs, and risks associated with staff changes. It will also help you ensure compliance with legal and ethical standards.  

To improve employee onboarding and offboarding, an ideal HR solution would be built (once again) on the SharePoint platform (yes, we love this tool because it's cleverly multifunctional). 

If you need to let an employee go, the system automatically revokes their access to internal systems and deactivates their user account without having to wait for the IT department. Easy! 

Automation to the max  

This point probably won’t come as a complete surprise. We live in an era where we automate every possible process to the fullest extent. After all, process automation saves us not only money but also time. It also increases accuracy, improves security, and allows people to focus on more creative and valuable tasks instead of manual labor and repetitive tasks. Want to get the most out of automation? Use RPA tools (robotic process automation).  

Asking what can be automated in your company? Almost everything. Digital document workflow, warehouse processes, sales processes, order automation, signing or approval, or processes specific to your company. You can also automate HR processes, financial processes, document extraction, or marketing activities. You just need to choose the right platform and processes to start with in your company. If it seems like you don't quite know which way is up or which direction to go, we will help you find the most suitable process for automation in your company through a process audit and analysis.

Cybersecurity is a "must-have"“ 

Cyberattacks aren’t just the stuff of action movies. Even as we speak, someone somewhere in the world is trying to force their way into another person’s virtual space. How do you know your company won’t be the next target? Do you have any idea how to protect your data, systems, and networks from attacks, breaches, theft, or damage?  

Next year, we recommend focusing on your company's cybersecurity. The number of attacks, data losses, and thefts is increasing, and you don't need to be a Nostradamus to predict that 2024 will bring even more attacks on corporate infrastructures and information systems. Properly configured cybersecurity processes will enable you to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your information, prevent financial losses, reputational damage, or legal issues.  

What can you do? Review the security settings in your company, from antivirus solutions, firewalls, VPNs, encryption, authentication, and monitoring, to the security of your business applications, internal systems, and cloud data storage. Don't take this as a warning or recommendation. More or less, it's a mandatory journey if you want to keep your company alive. 

Artificial intelligence for business processes

What about hiring an employee for your company who can learn on their own? Do they work non-stop? Can they perform tasks automatically and follow precisely defined procedures and processes? “Hire" artificial intelligence and improve your products or services, increase your competitiveness, and create new opportunities and value.  

We are not talking about generating texts through ChatGPT now. Rather, we are concerned with deploying artificial intelligence for your processes, record-keeping, and business applications. Solutions like SharePoint Premium with Syntex will enable you to extract data from documents, make decisions about process workflows, or write personalized marketing or sales messages for your customers. The sooner you integrate an AI employee, the sooner you will get ahead of the competition. A simple equation.

Explore employee satisfaction with tools

,“Happy employees are the key to a happy company." Do you know this saying? There's definitely something to it. When was the last time you asked your employees how satisfied they are with digitalization in your company or with the tools they use? Monitoring employee satisfaction and user experience with your digital tools is key because, in addition to people's comfort, it also increases their productivity and efficiency.  

Companies often provide employees with either a large number of different tools (which can cause confusion) or, conversely, just one comprehensive tool that was implemented by someone long ago, and the assumption still prevails that there’s no need to change it—after all, if it was good a year ago, it must still be good. But neither of these extremes is good. Pay attention to your digital tools and constantly improve them. As your company grows and your work processes improve, the system must adapt accordingly—it doesn’t work the other way around. After all, you can’t adapt to an outdated system and limit your growth and innovation.  

Save on everything except digitization  

What will 2024 bring to business according to analyses? Should we prepare for a lot of challenges, economic cooling, inflation, or a decrease in demand and investments. Ouch. Despair aside, we see light at the end of the tunnel.  

We understand that in such a situation, it's easy to resort to saving money. As a result, digitalization, automation, or business application development projects, as well as cloud deployments, are often put on hold, even though they are crucial for business and can mitigate market and macroeconomic complications. Therefore, in 2024, save where you are no longer growing and invest the saved resources into a clear vision for your company's digitalization. 

Final advice

Don’t rush into buying tools just because you feel you should. Consult with experts (????), conduct a process analysis, and implement solutions and tools that are comprehensive, easily scalable in the future, and built on a single platform. Consider SharePoint, which you may already be paying for in Microsoft 365 without even realizing its full benefits. If you’d like to know how to get started, reach out to us. We’d be happy to show you the possibilities of custom applications on this platform for your business.