Finding Ways to Save Your Business Money

Part of running a good business means refining your internal operations to reduce time and costs which affect your bottom line.  Improving these operations allows you to increase profit margins and this will allow you to invest more money in your business and employees which will make the business more productive and efficient.  The challenge is figuring out where you can improve internal operations without high up-front costs and without causing issues elsewhere which might increase costs.  Most successful businesses quickly learn how to streamline and maximize the efficiency of internal processes.

Here are some of the best ways to improve your company's efficiency:

Postage Meters

Postage meters have a number of benefits which save you both time and money.  With a postage meter you no longer need to spend time purchasing stamps and keeping track of them.  Postage meters have integrated scales which allow you to pinpoint the exact amount for postage preventing from overpaying or underpaying.  Whenever postage rates are updated online the postage meter will automatically update.  Less staff time will be spent on bulk mailings because they won't need to spend time figuring out stamp and printing and attaching address labels.  On average, companies are saving anywhere between 10-15% on postage costs.

Information Access and Security

Part of any successful business is having a fast, secure and reliable network.  If your employees are constantly having to struggle with a sluggish internet, disconnects and other issues their productivity will be greatly reduced.  Remember, when your internet is down or having issues for just an hour it is multiplied by how many employees need the internet to do their work.  Now that hour seems like a lot more.  Security is important as well to ensure nobody who doesn't belong on your network is there and causing trouble for your company.

Employee Retention

Keeping skilled employees who do a consistent good job at the company is worth a lot.  High turnover rates mean having to train new employees on a regular basis which is costly and takes away from a skilled employee's time.  Many new employees don't quite make up the amount of work of a skilled employee for several months after being hired either because they are still learning the ropes.   A revolving door of employees is negative for morale and can trigger more employees to leave because of the low morale.  Long term employees also keep your bottom line lower because they know the business inside and out so they are able to find more efficient ways of performing tasks.

We hope these tips have proved useful for your business and its internal efficiency.  

The Future of Shipping

Shipping has seen major changes alongside advances in technology at each step.  From the time when cargo was hauled by horse and carriage to now there has been a lot of thought and planning put into the logistics of getting goods from one place to another.  The methods for packaging fragile goods to be shipped have evolved over time too as a better understanding of how package design can protect them.  Shipping has seen a major leap in growth with the advent of online shopping.  As online shopping has grown, so has the need for shipping.  In the U.S. alone there are at least 191 million online buyers.

As shipping has increased over the last couple decades so has the speed of it.  Before the average time for a package was 1-2 weeks.  Now people are able to expect their package within a week if not two days.  Despite this increase in speed, the cost of shipping hasn't really gone up either; in fact free shipping is incredibly common.  Part of this is due to economies of scale.  As more and more shipping is being done the shipping companies can reduce their rates because they have more packages to deliver in one trip to roughly the same area.  A lot of companies have started eating the shipping costs too because it is a way for them to vie with competitors for best costs.  Data shows if shipping costs made the total too high 54% of people would abandon their cart and 44% would abandon their cart if they didn't qualify for free shipping.

Shipment tracking options available to companies today are both more plentiful and far more reliable than they were in the past.  Computers and the internet allow us to track packages at each step of their journey allowing us to know almost precisely the minute when they are delivered.  Twenty years ago that would have seemed nearly impossible.  Now it seems shipping is taking the next leap forward with technology.  Amazon is developing drones which they hope to release within the next few years that can deliver orders within 30 minutes of clicking the check-out button.

The challenges facing this concept are many, one of the largest ones being the FAA and the federal government.  Last month the FAA finally gave approval for a drone concept Amazon had submitted but that model was already obsolete.  The R&D team is moving at such a rapid pace that each month the drones are changing.  Because of the inability to test effectively in the U.S., Amazon has begun testing overseas.  The other major question that everyone must consider is how safe and how comfortable will we be with small drones flying over our houses on a regular basis.  How will these drones handle rough weather and what if someone can hack into them to reroute them? 

The future of shipping appears to certainly be an interesting one.