To answer this question and bring the value of migration to paper, you must first define what productivity is for your business, the importance of continual assessment, and if your organization can use this as a value-added proposition for cloud migration. Productivity is not a one fit solution.
How is productivity currently measured in your organization? Some common productivity measurements are: cost/unit made, call/hour resolved, mile/day driven, package/hour delivered. While these metrics satisfy high-level accounting equations, they don’t tell the entire story. What if you could make 25 more units per hour by eliminating the manual entry of work orders into the system? Or, take ten more calls/hour if the IVR was optimized to reduce call abandonment using a global platform?
These types of constraints can cause years of productivity loss. Many of these constraints are caused by antiquated equipment in the server room, too costly to upgrade. Organizations believe they cannot afford the costs to upgrade or integrate, think it cannot get any better, or have never looked close enough to recognize the opportunity for improvement. In reality, organizations cannot afford to lag behind updates anymore. Software packages continue to accelerate their upgrade cadence forcing hardware upgrades and integration updates regularly, not a scenario efficiently served with static resources. The lag cost can quickly add up, and in as little as 18 months, you could be looking at a forklift upgrade of hardware and software instead of just a version update grinding productivity to a snail’s pace.
Elastic resources in the cloud, headless integration processes that work without costly server maintenance, and distributed computing spanning geographic resources can quickly contribute to increased productivity and decreased costs. Moving to the cloud has allowed our clients to scale on demand for seasonal productivity increases without investing in expensive hardware that could sit idle for most of the year. In addition to elastic resources, the benefit of having an acceleration of specific resources ensures your productivity of computing is specific to your needs. Increased productivity is not limited to hardware scenarios. A cloud environment allows the ability to increase your workforce globally without VPN headaches, increasing bandwidth to your office space, or tedious data replication scenarios.
If you take anything from this article let it be these three things:
- If your business involves a measurement of cost, units, time, data, (ahem all businesses) then you are in for a productivity and efficiency upgrade enabled by moving to the cloud.
- Fear of cost, undervaluing the move to the cloud and the time that it takes are all short sided considerations. We can compare the now cost benefit versus the future cost benefit analysis for you; hint – its cheaper now.
- Biggest benefits include elastic resources in the cloud and acceleration of specific resources; be flexible, improve your important resources and leverage them.
Increasing productivity and decreasing costs is always a win, but sometimes it can be hard to know where to get started. Baufest has a deep bench of experienced professionals ready to guide, plan, and help implement your goals. We are prepared to ask hard questions like: what would you do with a little extra cash in your pocket at the end of the day due to this transition? Not sure what you would answer, but we would undoubtedly consider a pizza party! Let’s explore the possibilities together.