Three Surefire Ways to Increase Revenue and Lower Costs Today

Easy-to-implement technologies that can lead to office Nirvana

Let's face it — you'd rather do anything than organize your office. And streamlining processes? Sounds good on paper, but in reality, it's an uphill battle, right? Truth is, it's a hill you can take, if you follow these three surefire strategies and have the right technologies on your side.

1. Build an employee portal
One of the fastest and easiest ways to get organized is to build an employee portal. Essentially an internal website, here's where you can organize forms, Human Resources information, policy docs, and the dozens (if not hundreds) of pieces of content your employees need every day. In addition, you can Web-enable many of your HR processes, such as travel and expense, benefit election, and e-Learning.

This kind of "employee self-service" is proven to dramatically increase employee productivity. According to industry analysts, employee portals comprise approximately 60% of all enterprise portals, and SMBs continue to rely on them, and on Web-enabled business processes in general, to improve employee productivity.

To see your employee productivity improve, consider Oracle Application Server 10g Standard Edition One, which provides an out-of-the-box solution that makes it easy to create an employee portal.

2. Share information securely
Sharing information quickly and easily with customers, suppliers, and vendors is another key step to streamlining processes. Providing online access to critical information for your vendors and suppliers saves time, accurately tracks transactions, and reduces staffing costs.

Outside the firewall, businesses can provide access to key information to customers about products and prices, and can let customers track orders, check inventory, and monitor issues such as delivery and call service status, reducing burdens on service staff.

Sound like benefits you'd like to reap? Then check out Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One and Oracle Application Server 10g Standard Edition One, which provide rapid and hassle-free deployment tools for building a secure portal/extranet.

3. Consolidate data and build applications easily
The ability to consolidate data and build applications are essential when organizing business operations. Many companies struggle with data that is scattered and inaccessible online. To compound matters, many companies don't have the IT resources, including budget, time, or personnel, for building and deploying new applications.

One solution is to use a database-centric Web application development tool to quickly develop secure applications from existing spreadsheets or Access databases, which can be viewed or updated via a Web browser. For example, various members of a sales team can individually update a shared telemarketing file from their browsers, allowing data to be consolidated in real-time and providing immediate reporting. Additionally, administrators have only a single database to manage.

If this sounds good, then check out Oracle Application Express (the new name for Oracle's popular HTML DB). It's an easy-to-use solution that can consolidate any spreadsheet or Access database into a quick application that can be accessed online.

With the New Year upon us, now is the time to plan for the changes that will increase your peace of mind and decrease your stress levels. Office Nirvana might not be as unobtainable as you think! Let Oracle SMB solutions bring you one step closer.