Digital Platforms and Technologies for the Management and Administration of a Company

Digitalization has made it easier for companies to reach new markets, discover new business opportunities or execute new cost-saving processes. All of this would not be possible without platforms and technologies that make it easier for them to do everything from finding financing to automating repetitive tasks.

In this article we will review how platforms and technologies make the day-to-day management and administration of a company easier.

Tools to Automate Processes in a Company

Automating repetitive and mechanical tasks in a company helps employees to focus on more creative tasks. This also makes the company more productive, saves costs, and eliminates possible human errors.

The tools for creating automation cover a wide range of areas:

• Chatbots to mechanize customer service with a series of pre-set questions and answers.
• Social networks that send programmed or personalized publications according to user interactions.
• Accounting and administration of invoices, payroll, collections, or sales orders.
• Management of the entire commercial chain, from suppliers to inventory, not forgetting possible returns.

Some technology platforms allow these and other tasks to be automated, as well as offer an analysis to check whether the automation is working or whether changes need to be made.

To automate tasks, it is not necessary to have great computer skills: low-code tools help employees who do not know the ins and outs of coding to create utilities for manual tasks such as scheduling posts on social networks or responding to emails.

An example of this is Power Automate, a Microsoft tool that integrates applications with data analysis to make companies more productive. Any employee, even without coding knowledge, can create automations thanks to its flows and connectors from mobile, desktop, or Microsoft Teams.

Other more specific tools to automate processes are social media managers such as Hootsuite or Quuu’s machine learning enriched content curation.

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CRM and ERP

CRMs are customer relationship managers (CRMs). These digital tools gather information about customers such as personal data, purchases they have made, or tastes, in order to help in customer service or marketing campaigns. Thus, with this business application, the processes related to the sales department are digitally streamlined.

ERP is another business application; in this case, enterprise resource planning to manage day-to-day tasks such as accounting, projects, or the supply chain. With these platforms, departments can be interconnected, for example, so that the Human Resources department can send an invoice to colleagues in Administration.

Technologies to Finance a Company

Why use technology to find funding for a company? A database or a search engine helps to find the right investors or even payers for day-to-day expenses. In the latter sense, one way to find financing is factoring, a short-term financing procedure for the company to pay payroll, suppliers, materials… According to the Spanish Factoring Association (AEF), this sector and confirming (a way of managing a company’s payments) grew by 9.38% in 2021.

To make it easier for companies to access this means of financing, Plain Concepts has developed Hélix, a cloud-based tool that provides legal and technical security for accessing financing tools. From this centralized platform, risk operations are managed with clients (for which credit insurance can be taken out), and financing is sought via factoring. In order to offer the best service, Hélix uses predictive algorithms and historical data on creditor payments.

Other ways to search for financing are online databases, aimed at financing start-ups, but also at finding venture capitalists or other specializations, depending on the needs of our companies. The service offers information on previous investments and corporate news so that you can make a decision. The most representative example is Crunchbase.

Big Data Management in Companies

Big Data has become essential to design the next steps for companies. Thanks to it, corporate strategies are redirected, new business models are discovered or customers and consumers are better known.

In order to achieve these objectives, the data that companies generate every day must be processed and enriched with external sources. In this sense, data ingestion, storage, and processing have become easier thanks to tools that digitize the entire process and provide analysis that saves workers time and costs.

Platforms such as Sidra rely on Data Lake (raw and unified data repository linkable to a corporate dashboard in the future if necessary) to manage all this data in the Azure cloud service. In addition, enterprise data can be pooled there so that it is not scattered in different spaces.

The Cloud

Working on text documents in parallel and remotely, storing or transmitting video, storing large files… Cloud computing has allowed us new collaborative ways of working and to forget about traditional storage methods such as CDs or pen drives.

The cloud is also an ideal place to host applications that run faster, making it an ideal environment for testing them. There is no need to pay for servers or software to do this: the infrastructure is already ‘on top of us’.

A company can have its own cloud architecture, in a private cloud, or store its resources in a public cloud, such as Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can also opt for a hybrid and interconnected cloud.

Added to all these advantages is the scalable nature of the cloud, which makes this technology even more attractive for a company’s internal processes. Cloud contracts can be scaled up or down, depending on the needs of the moment. In short, you pay for the hosting you use, which makes it easier to control costs.

Do you want to know more about these tools?

At Plain Concepts, we work every day with these tools to make easier the daily life of many companies that are looking for a way to streamline processes, save costs or find new ways of business. We can create innovative applications like Helix or partner with you to solve your concerns. Write to us to start collaborating.