Cost-Saving Strategies for the Office
Today’s Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constantly face a wide range of difficulties related to everyday operations. One of the most compelling challenges for these types of businesses is how to control operating expenses. Canon Think Big examines the issue of office spending and offers you helpful tips on how to better manage various types of expenses.
According to 2012 data from Singapore’s Department of Statistics, 99% of the country’s total 171,000 enterprises are SMEs. These companies employ 70% of the working population and play a very important role in sustaining the economy. A few SMEs move up to become top businesses, some manage to stay afloat, while many sadly fail and cease operations. Business analysts often say that at least 40-50% of startups fail at the first 18 months of operation.
Money is a big contributor to these failures. Small businesses are often in a precarious position when it comes to solving the budget dilemma. How much must a business spend? How much must a business save? Is it more beneficial to save first before spending on productivity-enhancing investments?
Saving cost is about getting maximum value for your money.
Some may equate the act of cost-saving with zero-spending or stopping to spend altogether. But frugality should be within reason. Managing finances is all about spending wisely to get the most value for the company’s money. Drawing up a ‘realistic’ budget is an exercise in balance. It is about practicing restraint as much as it is about knowing which items are worth spending on. A ‘realistic’ budget allows smart investments that will enhance productivity and efficiency, and save more money for the company in the future.
The Various Ways to Save
The advantage of doing business today is that you can have access to resources that can help maintain work efficiency while keeping expenses to the minimum. We have listed down a few of these resources, from tax incentives to new technologies, to serve as your guide as you re-engineer your office budget to be more cost-effective.
Save on Tax and Cash Flow
The Singapore government, in its efforts to strengthen entrepreneurship, has created various initiatives that can help businesses get tax savings or cash bonuses for qualifying expenditures under the Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) scheme. Under this scheme, businesses can actually get cash bonuses or tax deductions from investments in innovation and productivity-enhancing activities.
Save by Maximising New Technologies
Technology has greatly enhanced productivity and efficiency in the workplace. It has also contributed to making processes and systems more cost-efficient. Canon, through different Business Solutions, has been helping many businesses from all types of industries manage their workflow better. From new generation multi-function devices, to document management software, Canon Business Solutions offer convenience, security, and excellent value for money.
Canon’s new generation imageRUNNER-ADVANCE (iR-ADV) series of machines are multi-function devices that can automate frequently done tasks easily to help enhance office productivity. Understanding the jobs people print is essential to adding intelligence to a printing strategy that ultimately saves costs. The imageRUNNER-ADVANCE (iR-ADV) series can help track, manage and even influence user behaviour to optimise resources and save money. These hardworking devices can be configured to analyse the kind of output needed, like enforcing automatic black and white and double-sided printing for internal documents like emails and memos, and choosing colour output ‘as needed’.
Canon presents advanced management tools to keep users informed of their activities.Tracking print activities can help manage how much a business is actually spending. By logging usage patterns, the system is able to establish when a device is due for maintenance or when inks and toners are low. Information like these can help take care of devices, so they can perform better, longer.
The more users share printers, the more important it becomes to ensure they have the correct printers available. Waiting for a slow printer to produce a large document is wasteful of both time and money – it also increases the user’s frustration with the print process. The imageRUNNER-ADVANCE (iR-ADV) series comes with advanced processing ability that is able to handle volumes of data. This allows multi-tasking, faster performance and ultimately enhanced productivity.
Save by Improving Processes
Canon can improve document management processes with a wide range of software packages that work seamlessly with its multi-function devices. These solutions have already been proven to create tangible benefits for businesses across a wide range of industries.
Galaxy Macau, an international hotel and entertainment group based in Macau, uses the uniFLOW system to set all of its multi-function devices by default to black and white output. This system even allows for the selection of ‘full duplex’ and ‘secure print’ options to reduce paper usage. It provides the tools to track the print volume and cost of every single department across various categories, for example, how many prints are being made in black and white or colour, as well as who is accountable for the printing costs. It also generates a “Print Health Report” on a regular basis, giving Galaxy Macau up-to-date oversight of their print output.
Login Manager is a server-less solution for the imageRUNNER ADVANCE machines, offering login and usage tracking functionality. Designed to fit into small to medium organisations, it offers convenient device authentication through multiple login modes. It also allows organisations the ability to manage security and costs by controlling individual users’ access and usage.
Save on Space and Manpower
The size of the staff also affects office spending in many ways. Salaries can take quite a huge chunk of the budget. While it would be easy to have a sizeable number of employees, resist the urge to keep on hiring. It is better to have a lean yet highly productive staff than keep a large number of people who may not all be performing at maximum capacity.
The number of people in the office also dictates the size of the space you need to occupy. Lesser people means lesser equipment and furniture, which translates to smaller space requirements and lower rental cost. Office or workspace sharing, a favoured practice of technology startups, is also increasingly being adopted today by many business with small headcount.
Save by Going Green
Invest in green technologies. These technologies are not only designed to lessen carbon imprint but to lessen spending as well. Mr. Ken Vong, Assistant Vice President of Customer Services, Information System and Technology at Galaxy Macau, confessed that one of their reasons for choosing Canon is that it is the only company to proactively propose using a toner cartridge-recycling program. “We print a lot of paper every month, and that means a lot of cartridges. Some companies just put them in the recycle or trash bin, but Canon tries to recycle all toner cartridges into basic materials that can be reused for other purposes. This totally fits our concept of what green initiatives should do.”
Reducing, reusing and recycling can also help you save costs. Reusing scrap paper, especially misprints or half used printouts, can make a big difference in cutting paper usage. Make these paper supplies more useful by printing internal documents and memos on them. Set up a scrap paper corner beside the clean paper supply so people can easily access them and use accordingly.
Be mindful of the office supplies you use. Choose the ones that you can reuse or recycle. For example, paper clips can be used over and over, while staple wires are only made for one-time use. Reuse folders, envelopes and boxes for as long as you can. Use crumpled newspaper or scrap paper instead of bubble wrap when shipping items. Avoid using disposable cups and encourage everyone to bring in their own coffee mugs or water tumblers.
Adopt a “Saving” Mindset
To make sure that all your cost-saving strategies will succeed, make them known to everyone in the office. Encourage every member of your organisation to adopt a cost-saving mindset. If everyone is united in this goal, strategies will be easier to adopt and maintain. More importantly, continue to Think Big. Think about the long term, think conscientiously and think more creatively about how to achieve big goals in a cost-effective way.