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Combat the increasing loss of productivity from sleep deprivation.

According to Arianna Huffington, author of The Sleep Revolution and co-founder of The Huffington Post, “We lose 11 days a year in productivity because of the epidemic of sleep deprivation.”

This is per person! Multiply this across your entire company and the mind boggles at how much more our businesses could achieve if we were all as ‘efficient’ as possible.

Let’s not pretend the problems, such as the lethargy at work caused by sleep deprivation, are something businesses can somehow reverse by passing down some edict that all staff should ‘get a god night’s sleep’ or be sensible and housebound on a ‘school night’. We’re all victims of the changes in our culture and the increased busyness found in the workplace is equally experienced in our homes, leading to many working parents not sitting down to eat until after 9pm.

So what can a business do? Invest. Not only in its staff, investing in their happiness and enjoyment working for the business, be that through cultivating an amazing office culture or a great perks scheme – we must do this anyway to aid staff retention. No, management also need to invest in the tools specifically for the business that will help to combat the lost productivity head on by ensuring the systems the business has in place create efficiencies that were previously impossible with the tools and business processes available.

Most companies already have CRM (or at least a Contact Management system) and accounting and stock control software is commonplace, but few have systems that touch other disciplines within the business, or indeed that touch every discipline. There are ‘off-the-shelf’ options (requiring significant customisation) to manage ERP and other business processes, but often, these larger software frameworks are either too costly to properly implement or they will simply never quite realise the original needs of the business…but create whole new demands on resources and budget along the way. Picture a square peg and round hole…

The answer…

The answer is not blowing in the wind, it’s with ‘Custom Apps’.

Now, more than at any other time in the history of software development, businesses are able to have systems developed for them that meet exactly their needs. Developing systems that tackle your business’s processes as you would want them tackled, joining the disparate processes together, consolidating the knowledge held amongst staff and unifying the use of data to create one or more custom apps that really add value to the business is a growing trend. And it’s a trend that’s increasing companies’s output and profitability.

Out with management by spreadsheets, paper and Access databases and in with a unique custom app solution that runs across device types.

How to create a Custom App.

The tools to enable the development of a custom app are many and varied, but it’s no longer a matter of programming from scratch in Cobol or Fortran, taking a long time and at huge expense. There are the rapid application development platforms and frameworks available right now that allow businesses like Contedia to take your knowledge, data and problems and provide endless opportunities to improve the accuracy and speed of your operations. Create time where time was being lost to inefficient processes and counteract the lost productivity amongst staff by making your business leaner and more profitable.

Perhaps the best thing about having a custom app developed for your business is that is frees the minds of management to think beyond the day-to-day operational tasks. In helping to determine how your business functions now and how it should function instead, it stimulates ideas and lights the way to more and more efficiencies and insights into the business that were previously impossible. Where once the business managed ‘data’, with the right planning and thought, a custom app can create knowledge and insight from that same data.

Find out more about custom apps, you might be surprised by the opportunities open to your business. Contact Tim Guest via tim.guest@contedia.com.

For more information about Contedia’s services call 01977 602869 or email talk@contedia.com.