APRIL 2016 • Volume 12 • Issue 04 5 Is Your Technology Helping Or Hurting Your Business? By Eli Nevizada Global Solutions Appliance Repair [email protected] www.gsappliancerepairinc.com With all the changes in technology, we have more and more appliances and models on the market. It is a hard choice to decide which one is the right fit for us and serves our needs the way we need. All of these lights and gimmicks are alluring and are eye catchers. Many commercials are offering new features that are supposed to make you think you need them. One example is a hand wash setting on a top load washer. Why? If we needed to hand wash, we will do that without a washer. It is another feature just waiting to go bad. All of these new features are not Godsends; they are supposed to represent progress, but instead they just create an illusion of progress. We must preserve the status quo; we cannot remove old features without creating new problems. For example: A Bosch dishwasher. Bosch is a quiet dishwasher, unlike other loud competitors. The design of the quiet dishwasher has problems that would not occur otherwise. Other dishwasher brands like the older Whirlpool are loud but effective. Its purpose is to wash the dishes, and it is true to its goal. It almost never breaks, and if it does it is due to poor maintenance or after decades of use. When an appliance does break we don’t need to run to the store and get the most recent model available. We need to get the appliance fixed and perform proper maintenance on the machine. That will decrease the odds of the machine breaking again. It is true for all appliances and even cars. More electronics means more failures waiting to happen. Mechanical components are superior in every way. Ask any honest repairman or mechanic and he will tell you the same thing. Everything breaks, but when it does it is only a question of how much it costs to fix it. In a world that makes us focus on the wrong material things and makes us grow apart from each other, we must preserve the old way of life, to have something real that can live a long time. Strong and durable instead of pretty and boring. Stainless steel is everywhere, get a proper metal, hang pictures of the family and paintings of the children on the refrigerators with magnets. Something obvious like a refrigerator can be a beacon of the family social life. In today’s business world, it is almost impossible to run your company without technology. Yet, you would be surprised (or maybe not) how little attention small companies pay to their technology needs. This is the bottom line: if your business were a human body, your network would be its central nervous system. Most of us pay better attention to our cars than we do our network. This impacts your company’s dayto day performance, but for the most part the impact goes unnoticed. Most small companies would rather spend dollars on marketing, staff, and furniture--anything other than technology--because they cannot see the impact on day-to-day results. The reason why this is so invisible is that the time lost is usually in seconds. Let’s make the following assumptions: you have computers that are not optimized for best performance and it takes about 30 seconds to open an application or a document. That in itself does not seem significant, but let’s also assume you have 20 employees and they each open that application or document 10 times a day. That adds up to over 8 hours lost in any given week. A simple replacement of the hard drives with SSD would save about 66% of that time; that’s 5.5 hours of labor. Unfortunately, we are simply not trained to look at the world this way. Let’s consider printing on an inkjet vs. a laser jet. The approximate cost difference of printing 100,000 pages (including the cost of the printer) is $4,200 (inkjet $7,800 vs. laser $3,600). This is under the assumption that all manufacturer-recommended ink/toner is used (aftermarket toners and inks occasionally hurt your printer). So the action to take here is simple: get a technology assessment by a proven company or use some of the tools I have included here. There is so much that could be said on this topic. I could write a book and not get even close to covering it. As a small business, we want to take advantage of every opportunity to increase performance and profit. For a nominal investment, you could recover hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of productivity, not to mention the huge impact it has on company morale. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. [email protected] Old Versus New
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