How can businesses pick the right enterprise collaboration platform?

Recently, we wrote about the leading online collaboration tools that facilitate remote work in 2020 and which are the best alternatives to Microsoft Teams your business can consider. We know how important it must be for you to facilitate remote work collaboration among your teams positioned far and wide, at their homes or co-working spaces. That’s why this time we decided to share a few tips on what all you need to consider while choosing the best enterprise collaboration software for your business. 

Half the year down, COVID-19 is still doing its rounds worldwide, pushing the economy to a slow reopening after months of lockdown. While some countries are experiencing drastic spikes in the number of cases, others are witnessing a gradual decline of cases. Irrespective of their geographical positions, a huge section of the global workforce is poised to continue working remotely for a long time to come in the interest of safety.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times

So, here are 5 things you need to keep in mind while choosing an enterprise collaboration platform for your business:

1. Evaluate your needs

All modern-day enterprise collaboration platforms have tons of features and each of these features may sound exciting when you hear or explore them initially. However, not all businesses need all these features to be present in their collaboration software. You need to go back to the drawing board, run a campaign internally within your workforce to identify the challenges they face in collaboration, the tools, and support they need through a collaboration platform, and then have a look at features offered by leading vendors. This will help to keep your digital infrastructure optimized and personalized according to the needs of your workforce. 

Rather than the management implementing a platform that is most appealing to them, the focus here is to garner requirements from the actual workforce who would be using this platform for collaboration and then pick a vendor that offers these features on demand.

2. Scalability

It is likely that every collaboration software you came across in your search will be a cloud-based one. Thus, you assume that they will be scalable. But scalability is not restricted to just storage on the cloud. By scalability, we mean the ability of the platform to grow across all dimensions as more departments and processes in your business go into the platform. It includes support for feature additions, easy development of new features, accommodating multiple processes and new policies over time, and above all, handles more complex computing needs in the future based on your business’s growth. 

A digital collaboration platform is not something that you invest and implement for the short term. It will be a crucial digital platform that will grow with your business and adapt to changing work trends in the future.

Read More: How IT Teams Can Prepare to Support Remote Workforce During COVID-19

3. Cost Efficiency

As described in one of the previous points, your business may not need all features as advertised by vendors. By subscribing to more features, you will end up paying more on the subscription fee if the platform offers a “pay for what you use” model of subscription. Some features may be needed only in the future when your business grows and more employees use these features. Hence a platform that allows you to configure your subscription is the most desired option from a cost perspective. Once you identify the features you really need as described earlier, you can pick a vendor that offers you the freedom to pay for only those features on demand.

4. Security

When almost all of your employees work remotely, it is likely that confidential and sensitive customer information will be handled through the enterprise collaboration platform you deploy. Hence there needs to be an adequate security protocol in place within the software that lets you make governing policies on data and information exchange within the digital environment. Permissioned access, transparent work and project management, logged activities, etc. will be required to ensure that there is no compromise in security.

Read more: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

5. Usability

When employees are suddenly moved into a new paradigm of working, there will be disruptive impacts on their daily routine. On top of that, if they are allotted a new collaboration platform without adequate onboarding time and awareness, the chaos will multiply many folds. To make a smoother transition into a new enterprise collaboration software, companies must pick a digital platform that has a high focus on usability and provides a comprehensive support and training exercise to help make the transition seamless. 

These tips could be video demonstrations, how to use manuals, a comprehensive FAQ section, dedicated support associates available all time, and much more. Platforms with intuitive interfaces and a shorter learning curve can be given preference for quicker adoption in your workforce.

The remote work culture is here to stay for a long time. We did not mean to say that there will not be a return to the office, but even when work resumes from office, employees would certainly feel much more comfortable to avail of Work from Home options occasionally. The pandemic showed us that it is possible to maintain your productivity levels while working from home to be on par with an office-based culture. 

Read more: How InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Hence the only requirement is that you make the right collaboration platform available to employees. With secure information policies, seamless cloud-based deployment and management, InfinCE offers the best enterprise collaboration platform for today’s businesses. Get in touch with us to explore more. 

Here is a list of the leading remote collaboration tools of 2020

We’re nearing the halfway mark of 2020, and most of the world’s working population has shifted to remote working. This transition would not have been possible if powerful digital collaboration tools for employees to stay connected were not available. From schools to IT companies, every organization has integrated an online communication and collaboration platform to help their workforce carry out daily operations smoothly and interact with their peers, customers, or any relevant stakeholders in their work. 

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

Here is a look at the top 11 online collaboration tools that made a difference for businesses in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. InfinCE

While collaboration and communication are the key elements to look forward while choosing a digital platform for your business, InfinCE offers enterprises with a host of other features in addition to the key elements like an integrated CRM, Rich management dashboards, cloud-based secure web hosting, virtual desktops and much more. It is one of the best online collaboration tools for small and medium businesses.

2. Microsoft Office 365 and Teams

One of the most popular players in the global software industry, Microsoft has helped numerous organizations manage their remote work operations smoothly with their pool of collaboration tools and platforms. From productivity tools like MS Word, Excel, etc. to video and conferencing solutions like MS Teams, they offer a large set of options for businesses to choose from.

3.  Slack

Slack definitely needs no introduction to several global companies as it has helped millions to collaborate efficiently even before the COVID-19 pandemic took things in a different direction. Offering personalized experiences, video and team conferencing, mobile app support, and seamless integration with popular cloud storage services, Slack offers a solution for all your remote work needs.

4. Zoho Cliq

From simplifying team communication to managing real-time messaging, task schedules, and automation, Zoho Cliq offers enterprises of all sizes with a comprehensive suite of collaboration tools. It also offers easy integration with other 3^rd party platforms for storage, calendar management and even offers easy management of customer relationships by integrating seamlessly with Zoho’s own established CRM solution.

5. Trello

Trello has a massive fan base across the globe, be it amongst organizations or individual freelancers and consultants. The primary reason for this fan following is undoubtedly the simplicity of the platform to help organize multiple tasks that require collaboration from a number of employees. The simple interface and easy navigation within individual Trello cards help managers and employees to handle even complex projects efficiently with Trello and it integrates well with other platforms such as Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, etc. to make the experience even more rewarding for teams.

6. Asana

From organizing workflows, tracking work progress, and facilitating seamless communication, Asana is still one of the veterans in the online collaboration space and has been around since 2008. Companies like Intel and Uber rely on Asana as their core communication platform to stay organized, enable better conversations between staff, and manage diverse projects and their individual task progress.

7.  Google G-Suite

Undoubtedly one of the world’s most well-known tech brands, Google doesn’t want to be left behind in the race for online collaboration tools. Its G-Suite platform offers a host of capabilities with a collection of apps for various enterprise collaboration activities. You have everything from emails to video conferencing to productivity apps all rolled into different subscription plans that you may feel free to choose depending on your organization’s size. With top-notch security, support, and scalability, G-Suite is a trusted platform for thousands of businesses worldwide to help run their operations smoothly.

Read more: 5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

8. Ryver

Ryver offers a simple and easy to use interface for employees to connect and converse within an enterprise. From the ease of setting up teams to offering privileged features to different groups and the ability to manage private virtual spaces for individual project discussions, Ryver has grown into a strategic internal tool for several modern-day businesses. A major highlight of Ryver is the Facebook inspired intranet feed where employees can converse together/with each other on updates shared by the organization.

9. Facebook for Work

How amazing it would be if virtual office collaboration tools work similarly to Facebook with the same theme and inspired layouts? Well, this is exactly what Facebook themselves tried to offer when they launched the Facebook for Work platform. From productivity apps to seamless communication channels, the social media giant has brought several inspiring features into the product aimed at making internal enterprise communication interesting.

10. Podio

Podio makes for a great mobile-friendly workforce communication and collaboration platform. It offers flexible configuration options and easy integration with several functional and productivity apps like Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, and much more.

11.  Basecamp

A darling of technology service companies, Basecamp brings together a very useful set of capabilities for communication and collaboration under one roof. With a highly affordable fee for unlimited teams, it finds tremendous use in companies with more staff.

Read more: 4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

With COVID-19 showing minimal signs of weakening, your business will be in dire need of an online collaboration platform to help employees stay connected. Get in touch with us to explore why InfinCE will be your best choice among the 11 we have covered in this blog.

4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

It’s only the second week of June 2020 and the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has come close to 7.15 million. Governments, businesses, and people have started to realize that we may need to learn to live with the coronavirus for an unexpected period of time, at least until vaccines are found that can neutralize or eliminate its threat for good. Businesses and universities have transitioned their core operations to adopt a remote work culture. Except for some critical work operations that require a physical presence in the workplace, almost all companies now operate with employees working out of their homes.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

What does this mean for the IT department across businesses who have moved into a remote work operation mode? 

IT teams need to quickly support the transition of the entire IT work infrastructure into a near 100% remote mode. From productivity tools to instant peer communication platforms, everything needs to be available for employees irrespective of where they are located. 

Here are some best practices you can utilize to get your IT team prepared for keeping your employees connected to their workplace virtually during such uncertain times.

1. Set Communication Policies

While remote working employees need access to multiple communication channels to effectively work on their tasks, it is important for companies to define the clear scope of each channel. One example would be an optimal usage of paid communication channels like VOIP facilities with limited licenses or shared licenses between departments. 

There should be a minimum availability of each such resource and policies must be laid out to ensure optimal utilization. 

Read More: How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

For example, if teleconferencing between team members of a project requires more time and more users to be connected to a single conference call, it can be moved to an online meeting platform that offers unlimited conferencing options rather than using limited license telephone-based VOIP conferences. This offers your IT team the flexibility to allot VOIP facilities to more demanding teams like customer-facing employees who may find it difficult to ask customers to get into online meetings rather than just a conversation over the telephone.

2. Secure Information Access

When employees work from their office, confidential information regarding customer projects may be distributed in local networks which could only be accessed from office computers. 

When there is a shift to remote working, this information should go into a more distributed storage facility that can be accessed over the internet. Hence a proper security policy and protocol must be defined for flexible information access over the internet. This allows IT teams to implement monitoring systems, maintain access logs, set privileged access options, and much more. 

Moreover, all employees need to be strictly made aware of these policies through regular communication from leaders, managers, and HR. Security should not be the sole responsibility of your IT team but an extended oversight of the entire workforce.

Read More: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

3. Provisioning of Digital Platforms and Tools

There is a huge demand for collaboration and communication platforms when employees work together on projects. The demand escalates to unprecedented levels when your stakeholders shift to a remote mode. 

From meetings to file sharing to project management, there is a multitude of managerial overhead for facilitating seamless operations while employees are working from home. 

This calls for the implementation of a powerful digital enterprise platform like InfinCE which can offer different departments within your organization the necessary digital tools and platforms for communication and collaboration. Such platforms make it easy for your IT team to manage overall digital infrastructure availability for remote workers and make support readily available for their needs at any time.

Read More: Best Practices to Remotely Manage Your Business During COVID-19

4. Measure, Analyze and Improve

For many businesses, this is probably the first instance where such a massive remote working policy came into force and that too in a very short notice. Glitches and delays are expected, but the key focus here should be to learn from each event and ensure a better experience the next time. 

It is important to regularly measure productivity levels of staff and align it with IT objectives such as availability, file management, security and data policies, software and license management, etc. 

Set out clear KPIs for measuring employee productivity during the timeline of remote work. The measured values should be analyzed to arrive at trends that occur in work patterns frequently. Feedback from employees should be collected with regards to infrastructural availability, network, or communication channel flexibility, etc. Learnings from all these should be factored in while your IT department optimizes your digital infrastructure to meet rising demands from your workforce.

Read More: How InfinCE helps you quickly transit to remote working

The remote work culture is expected to remain a norm for months to come as the COVID-19 pandemic is not showing a dramatic rate of containment of spread. Your IT teams need the most resilient enterprise IT platforms to help manage complex requirements of the entire workforce who are working remotely. This is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be their best friend. Get in touch with us to know how some of the world’s best businesses manage their digital workforce infrastructure seamlessly with InfinCE. 

How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage global health and economy, most businesses are beginning to accept the fact that they need to change their work culture to help sustain operations during such difficult times. One of the most successful ways that businesses small and large have followed to remain operational during the pandemic was by implementing remote workforce management at a larger scale.

Almost all staff of several organizations except those in critical roles that demanded physical presence at the office were asked to work from their homes. Several companies expect this form of work from home culture to last throughout the rest of 2020 or even extend beyond into the next year. With remote work culture becoming a mainstream norm, employers need to understand the importance of communication when a majority of their workforce is working independently out of their homes.

Here are 5 best practices that you need to incorporate to effectively communicate with your remote workforce:

Read More: Best Practices to Remotely Manage Your Business During COVID-19

1. Set Guidelines for Communication

When almost everyone works remotely to deliver business services, it is important for employers to set standard communication policies and protocols to prevent any disconnects or inconvenience from occurring due to lack of physical proximity. 

Your staff needs to be made aware of the different communication channels that are available, which to use for different scenarios, and how to approach others by respecting their privacy while working from homes. 

There needs to be a proper understanding of business hours and the need to complete any official communication cycles within stipulated working hours to ensure that employees get to spend quality time with their families as well.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

2. Ensure a Seamless Communication Platform

The first step to empower your remote workforce to stay connected with their peer groups or the larger organization as a whole is to ensure the availability of world-class communication platforms. 

Having an email tool alone will not be enough to facilitate seamless communication. 

From instant messaging to social media-inspired intranet feeds, your business must set up a comprehensive platform that allows employees to stay connected, informed, and engaged throughout their work schedules. A digital platform can unify communication efforts, help co-ordinate multiple tasks simultaneously, and help employees to easily gain access to support from their peers or management.

3. Proactive Work Communication

It is important to ensure that employees are not left out of communications related to work updates or new service requirements. You cannot expect employees to put in their best effort if you reach out to them at the last moment with requirements which may even include direct customer interactions. Managers need to plan work schedules in advance and communicate the same to employees for them to plan and manage workloads efficiently.

4. Encourage Video Calls

When employees stay away from the office for months together and work remotely, it is natural that they feel a sense of incompleteness in their work schedules. The frequent tea break chats, lunch and dinner outings, workplace fun activities will all be missed terribly and this can add up stress levels. As the situation doesn’t permit employees to catch up with their peers directly, the best solution could be to encourage meetings and discussions to happen over video conferencing. 

It will be much easier for employees to work together or maintain their relationships when they frequently see each other and interact with video conferencing. Video calls bring in a sense of togetherness virtually for teams who are distributed at different locations.

Read More: 5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

5. Transparent Leadership Communication

As you work on strategies to remain sustainable in your business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is equally important to keep your employees updated on the progress of the same. You need to assure them on aspects such as their job security, business performance updates, and other important strategic initiatives that you plan to take to combat the scenario. It is important to keep your employee communications transparent and ensure that they can freely reach out to the highest management level should a need arise for support. 

Read More: InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Your employees are your biggest asset and it is important to establish a clear communication channel for them to alleviate their fears. This communication could be established through newsletters, video broadcasting of leaderships, Q&A surveys, feedback collection, etc. which could all happen on a weekly or monthly basis.

The new workforce management culture induced by COVID-19 is sure to pave the way for a future of open work policies wherein employees can work from anywhere they want and only ensure that quality work is delivered on time. As businesses, you need to have in place the proper communication and collaboration channel for your workforce to operate seamlessly during remote operations. This is where InfinCE can be a game-changer in your business. Get in touch with us to explore how InfinCE can create the best remote working digital infrastructure for your business to tide over a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

How SMBs can attain positive business outcomes from remote working

It’s barely 6 months into 2020 and COVID-19 has pushed more than half of the world into some form of lockdown. Businesses are losing revenue either due to shutdown or lack of customers. Travel restrictions and social distancing norms are forcing small and medium businesses to limit their operating hours and ask their staff to work remotely most of the time.

However, the remote work culture isn’t that bad as many companies have found it to be a savior in this pandemic. In fact, a good majority of small and medium businesses are now of the opinion that they can continue this mode of remote work even post the pandemic as it will reduce operational costs significantly. 

Related Reading: How InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

So, the question on everyone’s mind now is “How can we manage the business efficiently during and after the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce?” Here are 4 tips to help you out:

1. Improve Communication

The most important aspect of maintaining relationships with your employees when they work remotely is communication. As employers, you need to facilitate a seamless communication experience for employees to interact with each other, share information, and foster a culture of continuous engagement. 

Remote work collaboration platforms like InfinCE facilitate this by offering a seamless communication platform that allows employees to interact over a variety of channels such as instant messaging, video calls, video meeting conferences, and much more. By ensuring that employees have the means to communicate efficiently, you can assure consistent productivity levels while they are working remotely.

Related Reading: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

2. Empower Collaboration

Most of the daily work done by your employees influence end customer service quality. It also requires the contributions from multiple teams working on different facets of a project or customer engagement. There needs to be a seamless collaboration mechanism that has to be in place to help employees easily connect with their peers, exchange information and files securely, set up meetings and discussions, manage projects virtually with diligence, and so on. To facilitate these activities, SMBs require a powerful virtual collaboration and enterprise management platform. 

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

Security is a prime essential when you choose a collaboration platform for your remote workforce since your employees need to handle sensitive customer information like financial data or social security credentials.

3. Promote Work-Life Balance

It is true that remote working was one of the most preferred ways to guarantee a healthy work-life balance for employees. But such a scenario wasn’t meant to be for such a long period of time and that too with almost everyone in the family also at home due to the pandemic induced lockdowns. 

As employers, you need to understand that an employee may not be always capable of putting in their 100% concentration on their computers while at home. They may have to attend to their kids or spouse or parents periodically and engage in some quality family time. As such, you need to instruct managers to be strict on time commitments just for the sake of making it an 8- or 9-hour working day. Let employees take breaks in between and work in their comfort zones keeping in mind only the quality of the work they are engaged in. You will be amazed to find that employee engagement and productivity levels would improve under such a relaxed schedule.

4. Team Bonding

While it might take a while before everyone gets back to their old office regime and talk to friends and colleagues over a sip of coffee in the pantry, there are a lot of activities that companies can initiate over digital platforms to help improve team bonding when everyone works remotely. There could be weekly fun activities where teams can participate over video calls and they can even involve their families who might be around at home. There are several competitions that the HR team can run online, and employees can participate to remind themselves of the fun they had while at the office. In times like these, such positive motivational activities would be much appreciated by employees.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

Managing your business successfully during the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce requires more than just interpersonal skills. A digital backbone is essential to ensure seamless communication and collaboration between your employees to ensure disruption-free customer service. This is where InfinCE can be your one-stop solution to managing your entire business operations remotely. Our cloud-based enterprise platform offers a host of features ranging from communication to collaboration to help enterprises build a sustainable workforce culture during the pandemic situation. Talk to our experts to learn more. 

As the competition tightens and consumers have more choices, small businesses often face the challenge of bringing the message out about their products and services. In other words, they seek innovative marketing opportunities to improve sales. Today, one of the biggest assets a small business can rely on to market their offerings is undoubtedly video marketing. If you are wondering why these figures will prove it:

• Up to 16 hours of video is consumed over the internet by a user every week (Forbes)
• 66% of all consumers would like to learn about a product through video demonstrations (Wyzowl)
• 71% of marketers agree that video converts more prospects into leads than any other form of content (Vidyard)

So now that you understood the impact video marketing can make, it is time to have a look at what the industry demands today in terms of video content and approach. 

See Also: Creative Marketing Videos of InfinCE

Here is a short glimpse of the top video marketing trends for small businesses in 2020:

1. Stories of Inspiration

Plain product demonstrations or glitzy advertisement videos many not excite today’s crowd. Besides, expensive advertisement videos may not be a good option for small and medium businesses as they need more financial muscle to run their core operations rather than diverting all funds into just marketing. So, the best way forward is to come with inspiring themes for your brand story. 

People tend to side more with brands that can resonate with stories of common folks who made it big. By pushing out such a story and getting a connection to your business diligently, the video you make creates a lasting impact that will reside in consumer memory for a long time.

2. Smart Video Creation Services

Today, there are several video-making apps and websites that allow you to create simple yet powerful video clips that position your brand appropriately. Once you have the script ready, it is just a matter of choosing a platform. It takes just over 20 minutes or so to make a video if you have ready-made templates and simple editing tools. While sophisticated tools and specialist editors can do a better job, it is always good to try something fresh on your own using the numerous tools and platforms available today.

Related Reading: Becoming Small Business Leaders In 2020: What You Need To Know

3. Optimized for Channels

A decade ago, videos were primarily hosted and viewed on YouTube. Fast forward to today, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., are the new arena for video distribution and viewership. The biggest advantage is the large social interaction capability on video content that is facilitated by these social networks. 

Videos that go viral on Facebook and Twitter bring unprecedented traffic to businesses that marketed it. So, a small business that wants to target video marketing today needs to create videos that are optimized for different social media channels. The optimization is not just on file size but also on the length of the video, content tone and voice, demographic choices for scenarios, and much more. 

The number of personalization options you can try with social media-based video marketing is tremendous. The right fit video can change the fortunes of your business in a matter of hours or days.

4. Shorter videos in larger frequencies

Videos are not just a tool to demonstrate product features but can be used as an informative piece of content like what blogs do. Thus, a healthy video publishing schedule is a growing trend among small businesses today that wish to succeed with video marketing. 

The videos would be short and crisp in terms of messaging and context but they need to be published more frequently, say for example, twice a month. Some businesses go to the extend of publishing one every week. The more video content you have, the greater are the opportunities to win customer loyalty through regular posting.

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

5. Interactive Videos

While this may not be possible for all kinds of businesses all the time, every small business can consider publishing an interactive video message at least once in their marketing calendar. With VR and AR devices becoming more mainstream, more people have the capability to view interactive video content at their convenience. The most important element for small businesses to consider while generating interactive video content is to incorporate their core business activity in the video theme.

If your small business is not capitalizing on video marketing, then it is missing out on a big opportunity to grab a sizeable number of potential leads. Videos are the best way to improve engagement and build brand loyalty. Once leads turn into deals, you have to be prepared to meet customer expectations. This is where operational efficiency and digital proficiency take the driver’s seat. To ensure a seamless digital-first experience in your business, get in touch with us to explore the possibilities of InfinCE – one of the best digital business platforms for small and medium businesses.

Why is ERP an Irreplaceable Asset for Small Businesses?

Cost factor appears to be the primary reason why many small businesses show resistance to adopting an ERP solution to run their business operations. With the advent of SaaS-based solutions, the scenario has changed today. Software-as-a-Service or SaaS allows SMBs to onboard the latest technology solutions like ERP into their business and pay according to their usage. 

Market Research Engine reports that among growing businesses, 96% of those who are successful rely on an ERP solution to run their daily operations seamlessly. Enterprise Resource Planning has grown into a critical business application for small and medium businesses as it connects data across their functional departments and allows unified decision making and service automation.

If your business is yet to consider implementing an ERP system, here are 5 compelling reasons why you need to invest in an ERP solution in 2020:

1. Unified Business View

ERP solves the biggest challenge faced by any business- data consolidation!

An Enterprise Resource Planning software consolidates data from across departments to help management make informed decisions. 

• From analytical reporting to inter-departmental approvals and workflows, an ERP system allows smooth operations in an enterprise by bringing every workflow into an organized digital framework. 
• From inventory to accounting and employee schedules, an ERP system can help trace the root cause of performance issues in your business easily. 

It gives an overview of where you need to focus on and how you can make critical decisions such as cost optimizations, resource management, and much more. 

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

2. Encourages Transparency

With an ERP system, you can cultivate a transparent work culture in your organization.

Across functions or departments, an ERP system allows you to map dependencies, track progress, raise alerts on areas demanding attention, and keep employees and management updated with real-time performance metrics of the business. 

• ERP forms a centralized database from which all departments can access and share information thereby ensuring a transparent information flow within the enterprise. 
• It also eliminates errors and manipulations from spreading into entire business processes by deploying quality checks across departmental management modules. 

Transparency at the workplace ensures that all units within your organization gain access to accurate information for their daily working needs.

3. Empowers Automation

An ERP offers centralized and automated management of work files as well as reporting for decision-makers.

Without an ERP system, most business units will have to work with a barrage of spreadsheets and documents to arrive at decisions. The amount of manual work to be done for processing documents, preparing reports for management and other work-related files would be severely high. 

ERP application helps automate a lot of manual tasks that employees have to spend time daily like for example, adding a new employee record in multiple business units such as payroll, project management, leave management, finance, compliance, and HR units, etc. If there was no ERP all these entries would have to be done manually and chances of errors and mistakes are relatively higher for manual work.

Related Reading: Automation In Small Business: 4 Areas To Get Started

4. Support Digital Business Transformation

An ERP serves as the backbone for an SMB to propel itself into new-age digital revenue channels. 

It promotes a culture of data-driven operations across the business and makes it easier for transitioning traditional business models into newer and more exciting customer touchpoints. For example, if you are into retailing, an ERP system can serve as the best resource for you to transition into an e-commerce business. With visibility into inventory, processes, accounting, revenue management, and supply chain efficiency, it becomes easy to deploy an e-commerce solution to derive data from your ERP and offer a superlative experience to online shoppers. 

Additionally, implementing new digital experiences in your physical business locations too becomes easier, as you already have data points to explore with APIs and have new tools act on your available data to create new experiences. A good example would be marketing automation wherein digital marketing platforms can be deployed to act on data in your ERP to roll out campaigns to attract new buyers.

5. Turn Competitive

One of the major reasons why several SMBs today are turning to ERP solutions is the ability of such systems to place them in a competitive position in the market. 

An ERP solution gives data-backed insights that help SMBs offer experiences to customers that any bigger and more established businesses can offer. Cloud-based ERP systems ensure that you can roll out these experiences without burning a hole in the pocket for expenditure. The easy scalability it gives to your business systems ensures that you can always forecast demand and adjust your entire business operations to meet this demand on time.

From managing your entire value chain to enabling memorable experiences for your customers, ERP unlocks tons of possibilities for small business enterprises. At InfinCE, we believe that ERP is the digital core of your business. InfinCE is designed to overcome your remote working woes. It combines numerous productivity and enterprise solutions including ERP, CRM, CMS, and HRM solutions, hosted on secure cloud environments, dedicated to your need. 

Related Reading: Why should a small business opt for InfinCE

Leverage the best value from your technology investments with InfinCE. Talk to our experts today to find out more. 

The key ingredients that make up an ideal project management dashboard.

Project management is an irreplaceable asset of any business. It plays a crucial role in driving successful business results. Across the globe, companies are increasingly investing in project management tools to help track the progress of their customer deliverables and ensuring efficient operations. 

But are you investing in the right project management capabilities needed to succeed?  

To answer this question you need to be aware of what a project management software needs to offer as features in today’s highly disruptive and digital-first business scenario. 

Here are our picks on the top 5 features you need to make sure are present in your project management dashboard. These will help your workforce to seamlessly deliver successful results for customer projects every time.

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow 

1. Smart Workflows

All your efficient planning and strategic direction of managing a project will not find a smooth ride to success unless there are automated workflows that help synchronize different stages of project activity. In simple terms, a workflow can be defined as a series of steps that will be automated to ensure that people and project tasks move seamlessly through defined project milestones. With smarter workflows, team members can be empowered with capabilities such as automatic tracking of project communication, approvals and status updates and much more.

2. Budgeting

The success of every project irrespective of it being a customer-facing or an internal one is primarily dependent on how well it has been budgeted. By budgeting, we mean that there is a transparent view of the project’s budgetary scope and it will be easier for finance or payment teams to view the progress of project schedules and raise invoices according to pre-defined contractual obligations. 

It becomes easier for decision-makers to get a holistic view of how the project is utilizing resources to efficiently manage budgets and scope changes. It also helps them to have knowledge about how much of these budgeted figures have been accepted by the customer or internal teams that required the project. The project management dashboard that you utilize should have a clear space for tracking your budgets and trace anomalies and unexpected escalations in billing.

Related Reading: 5 Must-have Features In A Project Management Tool For Small Businesses

3. KPI Indicators

In the age of performance-oriented work culture, there are quite a lot of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that every project manager needs to keep track of in a project. The KPIs could be related to the project’s budget, milestones and schedules, resource utilization, employee performance, time and effort, customer satisfaction indices and much more. 

The project management platform is the perfect place to have a comprehensive view of these KPI elements and hence your project management software needs to incorporate KPI visibility as a key pillar.

4. Team Management and Collaboration

Customer-facing projects often require a collaborative and constructive approach from multiple team members who may be spread across offices or continents in several cases with different time zones. Bringing them together and offering a seamless collaborative environment is an essential factor and the project management software you choose can play a big part in it. 

By having a dedicated section in the dashboard for team communication as well as collaboration options, platforms like InfinCE foster a culture of togetherness within the company that will be beneficial for sustained growth in the long run. Examples of collaborative options that employees can directly access from the project management dashboard could be joining meetings virtually through audio or video interfacing, sharing and working collaboratively on documents and files, tracking dependent task progress and much more.

InfinCE also supports you to quickly transit to remote working. InfinCE enables your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

5. Reporting

Decisions are often made by leadership by analyzing reports from project managers. These reports cover a wide spectrum of operational and functional parameters of a business. It includes employee performance reports, budget and billing reports, marketing and pipeline or lead generation reports, profit and loss reports, project progress reports and much more. And each of these reports may have multiple variants or sub-reports depending on factors such as geographical classification, vertical or industry-wise classification, product or service wise classification and much more. 

A project management dashboard needs to incorporate a powerful reporting feature that can provide comprehensive yet simplified insights of the entire business or project which will then allow decision-makers to utilize it for their next step or strategic planning.

Managing a project successfully requires considerable effort from managers and team members. But without a digital platform to organize all activities and tasks, there is no way people can handle complex project activities of today manually. This is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be the game-changer. Our cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform enables you to successfully manage big or small projects seamlessly with intuitive dashboards offering all the necessary features you need. Our consultants can customize the platform to suit your unique business needs thereby ensuring continuous success for your project management activities. Get in touch with us to know more. 

With the ever-changing market scenario, working effectively from anywhere is merely turning into a necessity more than a luxury. 

Thanks to technology!

Now businesses are able to counter strike even this challenge by switching to remote working environments with the help of remote collaboration tools. Statistics reveal that the number of people working from home has increased by 400% in the last decade. 

But a question remains: 

Although technology and remote team communication tools are making work from home or remote team collaborations possible, how efficient and productive can this work culture be?

For instance:

With the assistance of a remote work tool, your workforce remotely working on a critical project seems absolutely fine, until you encounter a problem that needs an immediate fix, like: 

• You end up struggling between multiple apps to reach the concerned resource
• Raise necessary tickets
• Share important info
• Monitor the task progress

This is crazy:

Multiple work collaboration tools might be enabling you to successfully complete the task, but compromising on time and efficiency is not viable, especially when the market is rough.

So what is it that you need to ensure an efficient remote working environment?

You need the right technology or the apt remote workforce management software!

While working remotely, what’s essential is to ensure enhanced team collaboration and efficient time management. That is where you have to find the right tools for remote teams.

Here’s the deal:

With a remote work tool like InfinCE, you can achieve this by enabling your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment. Eliminating the complexities of using multiple technologies, InfinCE, an integrated infinite cloud facility, makes the best collaboration tool for remote teams.

So, What makes InfinCE the best remote work tool in the market now? 

1. Reduce Technology Complexities with the Right Remote Work Tool

When initiating a remotely functioning workforce, it is obvious to first prepare a list of the must-have work-collaboration tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Spreadsheets and such. 

But it gets worse:

Let’s not ignore that switching between multiple apps has its own difficulties. And it’s a common task you will find in every remote collaboration tools

Check how InfinCE is reducing the complexities of engaging with multiple technologies for better remote team collaboration

• Brings the ease of swift chats
• Efficient video conferencing
• Collaborated worksheets
• Online task managers
• Schedulers
• Secured cloud file sharings

But here’s the kicker: 

InfinCE is providing all of them under one roof. Enabling a much more streamlined and efficient workflow under remote working conditions, thus InfinCE provides the best work collaboration software solution for small businesses.

2. Effective Communication Through an Efficient Remote Work Software

Smooth and effective communication is always the key to better remote team collaboration and a successful business. When it comes to remote working environments, streamlined communication becomes a necessity. Connecting effectively with your team and ensuring that every member is on the same page, might take more than just a few standard emails in most of the remote team communication tools. 

What must be done? 

Before selecting tools for remote teams, companies must ensure it onboard a variety of conversational channels like group chats and video conferencing, to facilitate a smooth and timely flow of information. 

And, here is the best part:

An online cloud platform and a remote team communication tool like InfinCE is dedicated to streamlining work collaborations by: 

•  Providing seamless chat options
•  Enabling your team to join active online meeting rooms through shared links
•  Takes remote work collaboration to a whole new level. 

In addition to it, this remote work tool facilitates efficient screen sharing and makes it possible to create an impact with intuitive and interactive presentations, even while working remotely. The inbuilt calendar feature makes scheduling meetings, updating events and checking member availability a whole lot easier, reducing planning time and enhancing coordination.

Related Reading:5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

3. Empower Your Workforce with Right Technology and Remote Collaboration Tool

Let’s face it! 

In today’s rapidly changing environment, it takes a whole set of advanced remote work tools and technologies for small businesses to gain competitive advantage, and survive in the market. When working from home, it often becomes difficult to access many of these required tools, compromising the quality and productivity of work. 

You might be wondering now:

InfinCE is a simple tool for remote teams and a platform built to improve employee efficiency and productivity. With a pool of online apps and remote collaboration tools, InfinCE facilitates seamless creation of online spreadsheets, presentations, and documents, letting multiple collaborators work together in the same document for better remote team collaboration.

The best part is: 

InfinCE enables members to place comments and suggestions in real-time, helps reduce errors and meets deadlines more easily even in remote working conditions. 

Moreover, InfinCE file storage facilitates secured file sharing, guaranteeing complete file security and enabling controlled access and monitoring of how your data is shared. Making InfinCE the best tool for remote workers.

4. Secured Cloud-based File Sharing: Crucial for any Remote Work Tool

Most small companies practice transferring files and data through USB drives or other hardware. Although such practices may feel comfortable and simple to use when working under remote environments, this may turn inconvenient, and in some cases, a huge loss and threat to the company if misplaced, damaged or gotten under the wrong hands.

To avoid such mishaps, it is always safe and effective to rely on the cloud when it comes to transferring and storing files.

Want to know the best part?

InfinCE, the infinite cloud platform, provides effective cloud-based file sharing, allowing employees to seamlessly access and transfer organizational data from anywhere while enabling proper monitoring and activity logins. Thus making it a very secured remote collaboration tool. 

Related Reading: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

5. Complete Access and Control: A Must Feature for Any Best Remote Working Tools

While running a small business with multiple technologies, it takes immense time and effort to manage and administer the effective functioning of each tool. Such management and administration become even more complex and difficult when shifted to a remote working environment. So, any remote work tool has to address this problem. 

We make things simpler for you: 

• InfinCE makes administration simple with centralized intuitive dashboards enabling seamless user management, department creations, and usage tracking, across the organization through our remote work tool. 
• With a single sign-on remote collaboration tool, InfinCE allows employees of a company to access all their business and productivity tools under secured firewalls. 
• With one single remote work platform, a company can gain complete access and control, while least worrying about infrastructure management, storage, backups, security, and updates.

6. Enhanced Productivity & Efficiency: Important for Remote Team Collaboration

In a remote working environment, what’s most important is to have effective resource management. 

Having remote work tools that do not cater to your specific business workflows might leave you spending more time and effort in managing the tool itself, rather than enabling you to achieve an effective workforce or smart servicing environment. 

An integrated remote employee management software like InfinCE gives your company the flexibility to choose only those tools and apps that fit your exact business needs, facilitating easy performance monitoring, and project coordination. 

With advanced tools to assign tasks to remote workers and monitor progress in real-time, InfinCE helps organizations drive remote working efficiency and overall business excellency while contracting the efforts and time utilized for resources management.

A fully remote and flexible “work from home” environment, demands technology to replicate the smooth coordination and functioning of an office work culture. Implementing an integrated remote work tool like InfinCE, makes effective project management, resource monitoring, group collaboration, cloud storage, and other business solutions possible, within the comfort of homes or remote. Along with boosted productivity, InfinCE also ensures a safe, secure and hassle-free IT infrastructure management for the complete organization. In rough market situations, it is critical for small businesses to rely on technologies that are simple to use, cost-saving and initiates enhanced business growth.

To learn more about how InfinCE can help your business work from home effectively, get in touch with our experts today!

Also, check out our infographic to unveil 8 easy tips to effectively work from home!

Simple Ways to Perfect Your Work From Home Routines

With this being the ultimate solution to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are now highly encouraging remote working environments. But, it’s also true that “working from home” is not an easy job. When you have your kids and family around, no maids coming in, and your email loaded with urgent work messages amidst loaded household chores, work from home seems nearly an impossible task.

But at this point of time, where your business needs more efficient employees at toes, it’s no time to go down on work or get distracted. Although balancing your work time and home time might seem a bit challenging, it is not impossible if you know how to do it right. Here are some simple yet effective tips to help you work better, stay productive, and keep aside valuable family time.