Here's what to keep in mind when making a technology plan for your business.
Business objectives
Your tech plan should come up after you've defined your business objectives. Although it helps to have something written like "automate all processes," it generally helps to be more specific, like "decrease time spent in scheduling deliveries by half." It's more realistic, and makes more sense. Look at the problems or bottlenecks you've identified in your operations and list down how you can achieve better performance there.
Quantify your objectives
It helps to put a value on how an objective will affect your business, so you know what it is costing your company, and you know what kind of investment to put in it. For our example above, let's say it takes eight hours a week to schedule deliveries for your clients, and it costs you roughly P100,000 a month of lost sales, wages, overtimes, etc. This amounts to P1.2 million a year of expenses and/or lost sales. If you are able to cut scheduling time in half, you'd be able to save at least P600,000 in a year!
Set your priorities
Based on your own criteria, you'll need to rank which objective you should be going forward with first. Even if your business has the cash to implement all solutions starting January of the year, you and your people's time is limited. You'll have to note that you have to put in considerable time in planning and interacting with technology and solutions vendors to make everything work. No matter how "turn-key" the solution appears, you need to prepare you and your business for it.
Set your budget
You'll eventually have to shell out money to buy hardware, software, network equipment, peripherals, and other solutions and services to implement your tech plan. Some businesses look at setting a very small budget for a solution that handles a majority of their operations, and complain afterwards on why the system they bought doesn't work. If you're going to invest in something that's going to handle ten million pesos worth of transactions monthly, it's a little awkward to allot a P10,000 budget for it. When you've quatified your objectives, it's easier to see how your investment can benefit.
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