How to Use Smart Technology for Your Small Business?

Increasing sales is not the only option to increase your provide. If we take a reverse approach, reducing your expenses will also result in increasing your profits.

In today’s time, where it is a cut-throat situation in the market, the profits are extremely low. Therefore if you are able to cut your expenses, you can either sell the goods/services at a lower cost and by doing this you would be able to attract more customers, which will result in more profit, or you can simply lower your expenses and earn more profit by not changing the selling price.

The purpose of doing any business is to earn profit and every business owner wants to maximize their earnings. Therefore if you are looking for a solution that can help you in lowering your costs, you have come to the right place.

Thanks to the IT sectors, now you can lower your costs using Smart technology. Businesses can use smart technology to optimize processes, reduce busy work and improve energy efficiency.

Benefits of using smart technology:

• Smart technology helps conserve energy
• It offers convenience at various levels
• It offers an unprecedented level of security
• It offers peace of mind to vulnerable people and their caregivers
• It saves money.

This is due to all these benefits that the Smart technology sector is growing at a breakneck pace, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. The number of IoT devices is expected to surpass mobile devices soon and experts have predicted that by the end of 2020, there will be somewhere between 20 billion and 30 billion devices connected to the internet.

Internet of Things (IoT) has created an ecosystem, which connects all the devices that you use with your phone or laptop. These devices can learn how people live and then it can enhance their comfort accordingly. Example: These devices can learn when the office is occupied by the people and then it can optimize the office’s environment accordingly. The device will maintain such a temperature that would make the people most productive.

Here are some ways you can use smart technology for your small business:

1. To boost energy efficiency:

Smart Thermostat can be used to reduce your wasteful energy consumption. It can automatically monitor energy usage throughout the building and adjust things like lighting, temperature and water usage, the usage would be adjusted to only where it is needed. This is not only helpful for you but also for the environment.

As HVAC (Heating, ventilation and Air-Conditioning) solutions use a lot of energy, using this can boost the companies productivity. Smart home thermostats have been able to lower the electricity bills by an average of nearly 25% at the state level.

Smart Thermostats can reduce the heating or cooling of the office when no one is there in the office and can increase it to make a proper environment for work when the team comes. Thus, this can reduce the costs of electricity and provide the best working environment for the employees at the same time. Thermostats are such a smart solution that provides its investment return immediately.

2. Automation:

Small business owners wear lots of hats, therefore removing some can be really relieving.

Simply put, automation stands for “set it and forget it”. The process that you are doing would now be done by smart technology.

Devices like Amazon-Echo have machine learning capabilities inside them. This makes the echo highly adaptable and personalized. It uses voice recognition to execute commands and it can also learn custom commands. It can control smart light bulbs, smart TVs and much more.

Therefore you would be able to control all your smart devices by your voice. You can schedule meetings. Supplies can also be ordered if you set up an Echo with a business Amazon Prime account. You can also connect it with your thermostat and now you can operate it by just giving commands.

By doing this, you can eliminate some unimportant tasks and thus now you can focus and work on important tasks according to your project scheduling. Therefore you can focus more on your business’s growth rather than focusing on unimportant business chores.

It also serves you as a personal assistant. You can ask it about the weather, play music, call someone, book tickets, etc.

3. To close the gap between remote teams:

The key to a team’s success is collaboration.

The workplace and the team have become scattered as many people work as a freelancer or from a remote location, therefore a lot of collaboration is done remotely. Various communication tools are used for collaboration as more and more people are preferring to work remotely.

Webcams and video conferences were the first technologies used for remote working collaboration. Now you can use Team collaboration tools like task and project management tools.

You can use a project management tool to allocate tasks and work on them from anywhere, at any time. This way, everyone is aware of their’s and other person’s tasks and the project scope.

You can track how much of the project is completed and how much is still remaining by using project milestones. Features like notifications, mobile app, tagging, filters, CRM, different views and chat, make project management tool the perfect tool for team collaboration.

4. Implementing easy and accessible security:

Smart locks:

Do you change your locks whenever an employee leaves your business?

Do you have to go back home, when you forgot to take the office keys?

The IoT(Internet of Things) has provided us with some much better alternatives for old and boring things. For eg: SmartTask is a much better wrike alternative for task and project management.

Likewise, they have provided smart locks as an alternative for old, boring and haptic locks and keys.

From my personal experience and from searching the internet, I found that keys stand among the most commonly misplaced items, so why don’t we replace the keys forever?

Smart locks replace the keys and it makes your smartphone, your voice or a pin the key, which you can choose from according to your convenience, and it eliminates the factor of misplacing your key as the three things mentioned above could be hardly misplaced by anyone.

Therefore using smart locks blesses you with the following benefits:

• It increases accessibility
• It increases protection
• You can handle your lock via your smartphone or you can also use keycards for your employees and thus you can also punch-in their arriving and leaving time.
• You can integrate it with your security system to know who entered and when.

5. Fitness and Health Monitoring:

The biggest asset that your business owns is you and your team.

The above-mentioned points were focused on your business, but this point will solely focus on you and your team.

Think of this as a low-cost perk to gift your employees or an essential or useful technology that you all should have, fitness bands and smartwatches can be of great use, after all, it is in every business’s interest to have a healthy and fit workforce.

Moreover, smartwatches can be used for quick replies and to see notifications quickly without reaching out for your smartphone or distracting yourself.

Conclusion:

Consider Smart Technology as an investment instead of an expense. This is just the start of the new age, ride now or you will be left behind. Sooner or later, all the people will start using Smart technology, therefore you should work smart and you should take full advantage of smart technology before it becomes a common thing.