How to Save Your Business Money

Cutting costs and improving efficiency across your business is a key objective for most businesses, and an important priority for hitting performance and monetary targets. Automated workflows are becoming an increasingly popular way of making processes of all kinds run more efficiently, and saving money.

While many people are wary of automation, there are incredible money-saving benefits to adopting automated workflows within your business. Taking workwear as an example, here’s a round-up of the rewards you can reap by investing in automated workflows.

Improve efficiency

The main benefit of automated workflows is that it means tedious, resource-consuming tasks are made much more efficient. When it comes to managing workwear, ensuring your team is kitted out in the correct gear of the correct size requires a lot of legwork: gathering shoe and T-shirt size information, placing the order, organising any branding to be added, distributing the items, ensuring extra items are ordered to cover mistakes and lost or broken items, arranging storage for workwear stocks, and keeping track of orders of replacement items and items for new employees. This all adds up to a time-consuming, ongoing task that distracts your team from other important work.

Workwear processes can get out of control, especially for large teams, and can end up making massive demands on individuals whose time and energy could be spent on other important tasks. This can lead to increased spending too, as in an effort to save time, orders could end up being approved without proper oversight.

With automated ordering systems (like Industrial Workwear’s online ordering portal), after an initial inputting of data for each employee (which can usually be transferred via a spreadsheet), a tasks that might have required a team of 5 or 6 people can be reduced to just 1 or 2 team members, meaning your other staff can be upskilled and reallocated to different roles more focussed towards your company goals. This reallocation of resource can increase your productivity, improving your performance and driving up your profits.

Increase employee responsibility

Automated ordering systems allow you to put power into the hands of individual employees. By placing the responsibility for ordering their own workwear on the employee, you can give your team a sense of autonomy and trust, whilst still maintaining control over branding and budgets.

For example, implementing a points system means that employees can order whatever items they need (from a pre-approved list) within a set allowance, with management approval required for anything outside of that allowance. Restrictions can be placed on what items are available for order, and control over budgets still lies within your management team, but the job of ordering workwear takes up nobody’s time but the employee who requires the items.

This means that employees are able to take ownership for their own workwear, making them more likely to look after their equipment, and your management team can focus their energies on achieving other business objectives.

Maintain control

Automation allows you to stay in control of spending and budgets, as well as the items your team can order.

Automated ordering systems can allow you to set restrictions on spending and specify exactly which items are available for order. This not only stops your team from overspending, but also means you can stay on top of compliance by ensuring your workers are kitted out with the appropriate PPE and workwear for their roles.

Streamline operations

Automated ordering means you can be specific about exactly what item, size and style is required for each employee, which means no more ordering bulk amounts of uniform in a range of sizes and hoping it covers your whole team. Instead, each employee is issued workwear and PPE that is specific to them, and this is delivered as a wearer pack labelled specifically for the intended employee. Automating ordering in this way also allows you re-order specific items without the need to re-enter size and item information, saving time and resource.

This also means that arranging and paying for storage for spare workwear is no longer needed, as reordering becomes quick and easy, and employees are issued with items specific to their requirements and roles. Crucially, it also allows you to build a paper trail of exactly what equipment has been issued to each individual, helping to ensure compliance around PPE.

Automate your workwear procurement with Industrial Workwear

Industrial Workwear’s cutting-edge online platform allows you to streamline every aspect of your workwear procurement, effortlessly managing budgets and ordering to save both time and money. Request a demo today to find out more.