Ditch the Clipboard with Digital Transformation

The beloved clipboard. Many offices have them and many still rely on good old paper clipboards to manage data and notes. Despite the comfortability of continuing old business practices, recording processes such as physical clipboards lead to disparate and unorganized data. With the onset and adoption of digital transformation, business leaders and teams have moved past the both the physical and digital clipboard and onto more efficient methods of data management. Check out today’s blog to learn more about why it is time to ditch the clipboard and embrace digital tools for data management.

Paper Clipboards are Hindering your Business’s Potential: Using paper data management methods as a primary strategy and process is only going to hurt your business in the long run. Data that lives on these clipboards is disparate and not shared between departments which results in poor communication and shared understanding for the team. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly important for business data to be updated in real-time to paint the most accurate image of the business. Clipboard data sits on the page for minutes, hours, and days without proper adjustments and updates made. Ultimately, there is so many digital data management tools available that absolutely increase efficiency and organization when compared to clipboard data management.

Labor Intensive and Subject to Transposition Errors: When data is recorded on paper and then transposed manually into Excel or Word Docs, it poses many risks throughout the process. Sifting through manual data and copying it into a digital format can become incredibly repetitive for employees and is a time-consuming task. When looking at numbers and data for hours, it is very likely that human error will inevitably occur. Bad data can result in nightmare situations; even if one digit is off in an entry, it can throw entire departments off. Implementing digital data management solutions to replace the painstaking process of transposing data allows employees to allocate their time to more productive tasks as well as decrease the risk of data errors.

Determine One Home for your Data: Are you still relying on disparate Excel sheets that do not communicate with one another?  Discarding physical clipboards are not the only clipboards that need to be done away with. Digital clipboards can also be very telling about when it is time to adopt data management software. There is no need to constantly be copying and pasting data in order to move it to its respective locations. Designating one home and shared database for all business data leads to increased levels of efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Maintaining a single shared database that allows for cross-departmental communication, helps make your data work for you rather than needing to jump through hoops and digital clipboards.

Digital Transformation Opportunities: Throughout today’s blog, we have outlined reasons why it is time to ditch both physical and digital clipboards for data management, but how does one begin the process? Adopting digital transformation techniques and processes can seem overwhelming for teams that are used to completing their tasks manually, but the results are worth the effort required to digitize. The first step in moving past the clipboard era and into the digital mindset is creating a digital transformation strategy that will work for your business. Every business has specific requirements, but maintaining an organized, automated, singular location for data is a great starting point for all businesses. Tools such as ERP solutions launch digital transformation strategies into fruition and help companies achieve the benefits of smart, centralized data.

Data Driven Insights: Decision making strategies and processes are integral aspects of running a business. By implementing a data management solution, your business can make better informed decisions based off the insights provided by the data. Data is powerful, but it is only as helpful as you allow it to be. This is why ditching disparate systems for data management solutions is becoming increasingly important as the world becomes more data reliant. With the help of data in the background, decisions are more accurate and effective in the long run.

How We can Help: Here at Softengine, we specialize in helping small to midsize businesses run with increased efficiency, automation, and accuracy throughout all departments. As a SAP Gold Partner with over two decades of experience in the ERP industry, we understand the power of data and how to make it work for you. SAP Business One is the leading ERP solution for the SMB market and is packed full of intelligent functionality to improve data management. Your success is out success, and we look forward to helping more businesses adopt digital transformation and take their operations to the next level with SAP Business One and our Softengine products!

For inquiries about whether an ERP solution such as SAP Business One is the right fit for your business, contact one of our Softengine specialists: info@softengine.com