Are inefficiencies killing your business?
Inefficient processes weigh you down and limit business productivity.
As a result, you lose time, and ultimately revenue, and this limits growth and increases the chances of your small business failing.
A study by Formstack found that 51% of workers lose two hours daily to manual and inefficient tasks. This translates to revenue losses of millions yearly.
However, you can recoup lost revenue that operational inefficiencies are stealing from you by leveraging the best business tools 2024 has to offer. These technologies will enable you to automate manual and iterative work to increase direct labor time.
With the right solutions, you’ll also improve access to information, enhance staff connectivity, and streamline innovation to achieve better business outcomes.
In this article, we’ll discuss essential tools to enhance operational efficiency in 2024 to help you improve productivity and accelerate growth for your business.
Quick summary:
1. FileCenter – Best for efficient document management.
2. Zoho Projects – Best for end-to-end project management.
3. Transloads – Best for managing transportation & logistics.
4. Slack – Best for improving business communication.
5. BambooHR – Best for increasing HR efficiency.
Let’s get started.
1. FileCenter
Is your workflow clogged with paperwork?
FileCenter offers high-speed, batch digitization technology to help digitize your paper records to free up physical storage space and improve document searchability.
What’s more, it provides electronic signatures to enable your small business to improve the speed, accuracy, and convenience of its signing processes.
You can also use FileCenter’s document automation to automatically route, name, and sort files. This makes it one of the top document management tools to help you improve operational efficiency for document approvals and general document work.
Best features:
- FileCenter integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Office Suite and popular cloud services like DropBox and Google Drive. This helps break down your data silos while improving productivity by minimizing context switching between apps.
- You also get an advanced PDF editor that enables you to annotate PDF files, accelerate document creation, and even compress files to save space. It even lets you redact and password-encrypt your files to improve document security.
- It has an intuitive filing system that overlays Windows Explorer to logically group documents into drawers & cabinets so you can retrieve files with a few clicks. This greatly smoothens the learning curve since it implores basic Windows skills.
Pricing:
- 15-day free trial.
- Starting plan: $5/user per month.
Verdict
FileCenter offers advanced document digitization automation, which helps you create a paperless and cost-efficient office. It’s also one of the top business tools 2024 has to offer due to its client portal which enables you to share files conveniently and securely.
2. Zoho Projects
Project management becomes easier with Zoho Projects.
It gives you industry-specific templates and project management workflows to reduce the time you spend planning and laying the groundwork for new projects.
Furthermore, you also get a task management dashboard that enables you to allocate resources, including time & personnel, efficiently to fast-track projects.
What else can you do with Zoho Projects?
Well, it offers an issue-tracking system that helps your small business identify, solve, and even predict bottlenecks accurately to avoid project failures and delays.
Best features:
- Zoho Projects gives you data visualizations like Gantt charts for mapping out project activities. This lets you create dependencies between related tasks & easily reschedule work as necessary to keep your projects on track and on time.
- You also get an interactive feed, where you can easily chat, comment, and discuss ongoing projects with colleagues. So it enables the seamless exchange of ideas, which improves innovation and collaboration for your small business.
- It has a blueprint editor that lets you design and customize workflows to automate iterative work. You can even set triggers for email alerts once the project hits various milestones to help improve approvals & reduce delays.
Pricing:
- 10-day free trial.
- Starting plan: $5/user per month.
Verdict
Zoho Projects offers end-to-end project automation and it’s a great option if you’d like to accelerate projects & improve their success rates. That being said, I’ve noticed that time tracking can be an uphill task, especially when you’re working on very complex projects.
3. transloads
transloads can streamline transportation and logistics.
You can use it to track inbound and outbound shipments in real-time, which allows your small business to gain excellent supply chain visibility. This can help you improve logistics management to enhance decision-making and minimize operational delays.
transloads also offers robust inventory management features that enable you to reduce inventory errors and lower turnaround time for transloading operations.
Moreover, it’s one of the most recommended transloading software for multi-commodity handling. It can improve transloading throughput when you’re transporting commodities like lumber, pallets, ISO containers & bulk raw materials.
Best features:
- transloads is a cloud-based solution, so it enables remote access to information to help streamline coordination between field crews and your back office. This also reduces your IT burden because there’s nothing to deploy or maintain.
- You also get invoice automation features that help you capture data for inbound & outbound cargo. This allows you to generate invoices faster and more accurately to help improve your cash flow and strengthen vendor relationships.
- transloads offers customizable bills of lading templates that accelerate paperwork processing in transloading to improve your throughput. This reduces iterative work while improving security and transparency by preventing tampering.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Starting plan: $29.95 per payload.
Verdict
If you need to transload a huge variety of commodities, I recommend transloads because of its versatility & efficiency. In addition, you get barcode scanning technology to help extract data from freights more conveniently to minimize manual data entry work.
4. Slack
Want to improve business communication?
A Project.co survey revealed that 70% of workers lose time to perennial communication challenges. This emphasizes the importance of Slack’s multi-channel communication features that help you connect with clients and co-workers better.
In addition, Slack gives you unlimited and searchable message histories that you can quickly peruse to find key project updates in case you missed a meeting.
You also get a built-in staff directory that lets you scrutinize compatible partners for tasks, which makes it one of the top business tools 2024 for improving collaboration.
Best features:
- Slack centralizes team communication into a virtual workspace giving you a more effective way of collaborating than email. This reduces the risk of overlooked messages and also minimizes the need to juggle multiple tools and systems.
- With Slack Huddles, you can create a live workspace to hold meetings with colleagues and work side by side in real-time. So it reduces the need for face-to-face meetings which can easily be disrupted by unexpected events.
- Slack Canvas lets you curate important content about a project’s milestones, briefings, stakeholders, and much more. This improves knowledge sharing during team projects and makes it easy to reference data during business meetings.
Pricing:
- Unlimited free plan.
- Starting plan: $4.38/user per month.
Verdict
If you’ve been struggling to handle business communications via email, Slack offers a better way to communicate & collaborate. Nevertheless, you can experience notification overload when working with large teams, and this can be a significant distraction.
5. BambooHR
Want a holistic HR management solution?
BambooHR offers essential payroll management features that let you track and record hours worked and time off. This can help you run your payroll and manage benefits more efficiently.
Moreover, you get an applicant tracking system that helps you improve the quality of your hiring decisions and streamline employee onboarding.
With BambooHR, you can also track key staff engagement metrics at work, including employee satisfaction. Therefore, I rate it among the best tools 2024 has to offer if you’d like to improve employee performance in your small business.
Best features:
- BambooHR offers a robust talent management system that lets you identify areas of improvement and employee strengths. This information can help you improve employee engagement, reduce staff turnover, and lower your hiring expenses.
- It lets you create a centralized staff database for organizing and storing records like personal medical information, residency verification, and tax forms. So it can help you comply with regulatory requirements for employee record-keeping.
- You can create custom HR workflows that enable you to easily delegate or automate tasks like approving raises & leave requests. This can help reduce turnaround time for important decisions and improve your business’s productivity.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Contract BambooHR for pricing.
Verdict
BabmbooHR has applicant tracking, payroll management & talent nurturing capabilities which makes it a holistic HR solution for your business. However, the user interface is quite clunky and difficult to use and this can increase the software’s time to value.
Conclusion
Inefficiencies undermine your bottom line.
When you don’t address operational inefficiencies, employee performances plummet, potentially causing project failures that decrease profit margins.
In fact, employees are productive for only 2 hours and 53 minutes daily according to a Vouchercloud study. This is largely down to operational inefficiencies and various workplace distractions.
By utilizing the best business tools 2024, you can eliminate iterative tasks and limit opportunities for time-wasting to unshackle productivity and achieve your business’s true revenue potential.
With the right technologies in your workflow, you’ll also delegate drudge work across various departments and increase focus on revenue-driving tasks.
