5 processes to digitalize at the turn of the year | clockin

Is digitalization your resolution?

Every year you resolve all over again to become more digital, to optimise your working processes and simply to change a few structures in your business - and yet every year you end up with the same question: How? Where do I start? Change is no easy undertaking. Depending on how big your business is, changing certain processes can take quite a while.

But smaller businesses face challenges here too. Long-established processes, big age gaps in the workforce, lots of different characters and simply too little time.

This article is meant to help you build up an overview bit by bit of what you can do, how best to put it into practice and where you might need to be careful.

Status quo

Let's start with the status quo - how does your business work at the moment? Focus for a moment on which processes in your business are working right now and which have room for improvement. And perhaps also ask yourself: is there even a process, or do you just do things somehow?

Paper-based processes have sometimes become such second nature to us that we don't even realise they are inefficient and are costing us money right now. So the status quo is a good point to involve your team as well and look at where you stand and where you would like to go. Which work packages are the ones that keep being annoying?

After that you can start thinking about what the digitalization of your processes should look like.

Why digitalization?

Digitalize your business, or you will have a hard time in the future - we have all certainly heard that sentence more than once. But why should “digitalization” be on my list of resolutions for the coming year? Why does it make me more competitive? Why does it make me more attractive?

• A major aspect of digitalization is automating working processes. That way you can save yourself a lot of time and let software work for you - and as we know, time always means money too.
• But digitalization also brings a completely different working structure with it - data can be retrieved more easily, communication is faster and less complicated, it makes working from anywhere possible.
• We live in a digitalized world - mobile phones have become an extension of the arm, we can hardly think without them. That is especially true for the younger generations, the people you may be hiring in your business right now or will be hiring soon. Digital tools are what they grew up with; an environment built on paper-based processes is often alien to them.
• All these advantages mean that you can work more effectively and more efficiently. With optimised processes and motivated, competent staff, your business holds up considerably better in a competitive market.

Those are only some of the aspects that digitalization can bring with it. All in all, though, every bit of effort you put into this change will pay off.

Strategies and measures

So what exactly can you change? Or what should you change? Of course, all these measures depend on your status quo. Perhaps you already use digital tools in your business or have already digitalized certain processes. In that case this list may help you go a step further, question other processes and become even more efficient in your working processes.

1. Improve your digital infrastructure

In principle the first measure should be to take a look at the infrastructure within your business. You could switch to cloud-based tools in order to get a better overview of your data.

Small steps in particular, such as your own  and above all consistent communication platform for exchanging information within the business. A platform/app/website for communication within your team can make the exchange faster and better organised.

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But bureaucratic processes such as working time tracking belong here too. Digital time tracking gives you the chance to be more mobile, to record data more precisely and above all to be more transparent and legally compliant.

2. Training and further education

Training your staff is a big step on the way to digital company structures. Training courses are offered in many places - whether general courses on handling digital devices or courses run by individual companies on using their own tools.  

3. Introducing new technologies

When we hear the term “new technologies” we immediately think of artificial intelligence and robots or similar. These are useful tools and can be used in more versatile ways than you might think at first. Chatbots such as ChatGPT can be a great help with certain questions, uncertainties or decisions. When using ChatGPT, however, always bear in mind that it is not legally compliant and in the end merely links together collected data, which does not always have to be correct. So it is best to check everything over again.

Artificial intelligence, however, is a measure for advanced digitalization. You can interpret the term “new” in your business however it fits. Perhaps introducing a tablet for project documentation is a first step. Or using analytics tools that can help you be more effective. Once you start capturing data about your own workflows and jobs, you understand which jobs you actually earn money with and where potential revenue is being left on the table.

These days new technologies come onto the market almost daily, all wanting to make our lives easier. Some of them do, others rather less so. We recommend asking around a little within your industry and, ideally, doing a bit of research into which tools, programmes and digitalization options are actually out there for you. As a rule of thumb: uncover a problem that is bothering you right now, and only then look for a suitable tool that you believe can solve your problem.

4. Digitalize customer interaction

External processes are just as important as internal ones. You can make your office as digital as possible, but none of it reaches your customers. Here things are still communicated by letter and telephone - which is not a bad thing, just simply outdated in some areas.

It starts with your presence. Where do I find information about your business? Is there a website of your own, and if so, what does it look like? Is it helpful for the user? Take a critical look at how you present yourself on the internet. Because unfortunately this is how it is: if I can't find you online, you don't exist.

But direct customer contact can run digitally too. With some tools you can, for example, allow your customers to follow the progress of their projects themselves. That will certainly save you a number of time-consuming customer appointments. On top of that, these measures make you come across not only as more modern, but also as more professional.

5. Optimise digital workflows

We have already talked about how digitalizing your infrastructure can influence your business processes. But the concrete working processes themselves in particular can make a big difference.

Let's take a look at bureaucratic processes such as vacation requests, timesheets and the like. These tasks are often time-consuming and tedious. And yet they are tasks that can be digitalized very easily.

Vacation requests, for example, can be managed digitally via apps. The data lands straight on your desk and for you it is only a few clicks.

It works the same way with digital time tracking. Tracking via apps results in automatic timesheets at the end of the month. No more entering things by hand.

Find out how you can automate your processes with clockin.​​​​​​​

Automating processes in order to increase efficiency and reduce manual tasks.

Conclusion and recommended actions

So what to do now? Well, start with the status quo, with your existing processes, and go from there. Digital transformation is a process. Start small and work your way up step by step. And who knows, maybe this time next year you will already be looking into topics such as blockchains and how you can use VR headsets for your projects.

Because every beginning is a little hard, we want to give you one more small piece of help here: sometimes you find solutions that kill several birds with one stone. One such solution is clockin. Built as a system for digital time tracking, clockin does not only solve one problem for you. Alongside working time tracking, the app also lets you manage vacation requests, capture other important data such as travel time and project hours, and take your project management to a new level with the digital project file.

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