Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: sponsored posts

  • Making business more flexible with cloud computing

    Making business more flexible with cloud computing

    This post is third in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    One of the challenges for a growing business is the cost of equipping new workers, cloud computing is making this easier and making companies more flexible.

    Not so long ago, the cost of setting up a new staff member with a computer, software and all the other oncosts was prohibitive. In industries like architecture, design or Engineering it was quite possible to spend $30,000 on a fully equipped workstation.

    For most businesses it was quite typical to send $3,000 on a PC fitted out with Microsoft Office, line of business software and associated IT setup costs.

    Often the employee costs were even higher as they spent days sitting around waiting for the IT people to get around to setting up an account or a new license to arrive for the critical business software tools.

    For businesses with varying workflows — particularly those in project based industries like designers and architects — these costs were a major hassle if you were only taking on a contractor or temporary worker for a few weeks. It either meant wasting capital on expensive equipment that was unused most of the time or paying outrageous rental fees.

    With the arrival of cloud computing all of this changed and the relatively cheap cost of setting up new workers is now one of the reasons why it’s so easy to start a business.

    Another benefit of cloud computing is it allows staff to work from home and on the road. Not so long ago, remote working was a complex and expensive thing to set up, now the cloud services don’t care where you’re connected.

    The modern cloud computing model is coming up to being a decade old and smart businesses are using its benefits to their advantage, those who haven’t explored the benefits are being left behind.

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  • Tipping and mobile payments

    Tipping and mobile payments

    This post is the second in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    During the recent switch over to chip and pin payments, many in the restaurant industry feared that tips would fall and waitstaff would lose jobs, the reality is somewhat different claims PayPal.

    Last week I had the opportunity to tour the PayPal Innovation Centre in San Jose where they showed off the work they are doing in the retail and hospitality industries to change payment systems.

    One of the products they showed was their Pay At Table app that integrates into a café or restaurant’s point of sale system and allows customers to pay their bills immediately.

    The immediate reaction to this has been resistance from restaurant managers who were worried customers to skip without paying. For waitstaff, the worry was they could be replaced by an app.

    It turns out the technology has had a different effect, the productivity of floor staff in the establishments where the app has been trialled has improved substantially.

    “In a typical café it takes around ten minutes to get the check,” says the lead demonstrator of the Innovation Center, Michael Chaplin. “We find that freeing waitstaff up to help customers and letting them pay their bills faster means everybody is happier.”

    With that ten minute per table improvement, management have found customers’ satisfaction has improved and the waitstaff have seen tips improve – partly because diners are happy and also because the tipping is integrated into the payment, calculating an appropriate gratuity is always a hassle in the United States.

    That ease of payment from mobile phone and table apps is rolling across industries, it’s not just limited to the hospitality sector. Increasingly these technologies are being used by tradespeople, retailers and across the service industries

    Increased productivity is more than just saving money and reducing staff numbers, it’s about giving the customer a more seamless and easy experience.

    All business need to think carefully about how they can use technology to improve their service and increase revenues.

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  • Collaboration and the cloud

    Collaboration and the cloud

    This post is one in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    A few months after the iPad was launched in 2010 I was at an event that showed how quickly cloud computing was changing the workplace.

    The event was a demonstration on cloud computing services to a room full of company directors and the organisers had assumed they would be scarcely capable of using a web browser.

    It turned out the organisers were wrong, one of the older directors waved his iPad around and declared the device had changed his life.

    “We used to get a fat parcel of papers a week before a board meeting,” he said. “We’d be ringing each other up to discuss things and no-one knew if they were Arthur or Martha.”

    “Now all the documents are uploaded and we can all work on them, take notes and see what each other has to say. It saves us a heap of work.”

    This gentlemen was, to be polite, a pre-baby boomer and a director of a medium sized insurance company. This was not a business full of hipster Gen-Ys at a funky startup.

    We should also keep in mind this conversation was four years ago when the online tools were far more basic, smartphones were not as refined as today and mobile internet wasn’t as affordable or accessible.

    Today almost every employee has access to the web and collaboration tools through their smartphone, tablet computer or laptop and this gives every business the opportunity to be doing what that insurance company had in place for its directors in 2010.

    Shortly after that conversation I was speaking at a technology conference in country New South Wales about this and during one of the sessions one of the attendees described how her timber yard had improved productivity through using online spreadsheets.

    In the past the timberyard had used paper based systems to give customers quotes. From the salesman’s visit it could take up to two weeks for the business to get prices back to prospective clients.

    Once on the cloud the sales team could access shared documents, price lists and brochures which allowed them to write up quotes on the spot, get them immediately approved by their managers and into the clients’ hands while still on the site.

    “We were winning jobs simply because we were so fast,” the lady told me.

    It’s tempting to think all of the airy talk about collaboration is just for sexy startup companies but as an old school insurance company in Melbourne and a timberyard in New South Wales shows, cloud services are delivering real productivity and sales improvements to all sorts of industries.

    For all businesses, the greatest challenge is getting staff working together effectively, there’s now no reason for any company not to be using cloud services to give the workplace a boost.

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