Enhanced Operational Effectiveness
For a small business, the advantages of a mobile app go beyond customer retention. Let’s speak about one of the most important aspects of running a small business: operational efficiency. The expenditures of running a business might sneak up on you and wipe out your entire budget! This can be a very difficult position for a small firm.
A mobile app can assist your company with internal operations, inter-departmental collaboration, and cost reduction.
There are now a number of companies that work with the bulk of their personnel in the field or from home. The work environment has evolved to the point where a large proportion of employees work from home.
When it comes to intra-office or inter-departmental communication, this can be a nightmare. Making constant calls to the office to clarify a hundred things in a day can only add to the system’s inefficiencies, not to mention the costs associated with it.
It is critical for a new age firm to have an effective channel of communication that allows departments or teams to stay linked with one another without much work or difficulty. A mobile app created specifically for this purpose can fill this void and provide a seamless and effective communication channel.
As a result, rather than hiring individuals to answer the phones, answer every query from field staff, or work remotely, you, as a business owner, free up valuable resources to pursue other, more useful tasks.
This one small action is sufficient to keep employees engaged and connected to the organisation, so motivating them to perform better and provide better outcomes.
So, if your office is experiencing operational inefficiency, a mobile app could be a lifesaver.
Cost-cutting in operations
A mobile app, as we previously stated, may help a business expand in a variety of ways beyond just attracting customers. Mobile apps with a solid communication channel have the natural capacity to smooth out the flow of operations, lowering total operational costs.
Cumberland Farms is an excellent example that I can use here. The company employs over 6,000 people and earns over $16 billion in annual revenue from its more than 500 gas stations and retail stores. What’s remarkable is that even a large corporation like that has opportunity for improvement in its operations.
The largest issue they had was that each of their locations had a huge number of records – all on paper! Yes, even in this day and age, they kept track of things like work orders, timesheets, inventories, and inspection records in this manner. This was not the end of the list of paper records.
If you’ve ever worked with paper documents of this size and scope, you understand how difficult it can be to keep track of everything. It’s difficult to keep track of everything, which means processing times can take a long time. When a result, as Cumberland Farms grew in size, the pace of their processing slowed.
The company decided to build an app to simplify problems and streamline processes, and the major benefit they claim is that they were able to save a significant amount of money on operational costs. The company started by integrating mobile forms within the app for a variety of key tasks such as parts requests, inventory management, and guest reports. The results appeared to be positive, which encouraged them to keep investing in their mobile apps.
They now have over 20 distinct mobile forms in their app and are working to eliminate paper. Not only would this improve their internal operations, but it would also save you a lot of money.
Building a mobile app to handle all of their forms was a single choice that resulted in an annual cost savings of more than $11,000. To top it off, they were able to save 845 hours of work every year!
When they took a step back and looked at the big picture at the end, they realised that they had made a profit of more than $400,000 on their investment.
You may be a lot smaller company now, and your spending on paper records may not be comparable. However, there are a number of such activities in your day-to-day operations that can be avoided or altered in order to save money by using a mobile app for your company.
The first step for you to take here is to make a list of the most expensive and inefficient components of your business processes, so you know exactly what your mobile app’s purpose is.
