Category: Communication

Presentation Creation … That Does What It’s Created To Do

Powerpoint presentations are here to stay. Whatever the context of the business event, you’ll find they are almost always accompanied by a slideshow. It’s particularly true of sales presentations, where winning over the audience is absolutely crucial. However, Powerpoint is now treated as a standard fixture, which means that it’s used whether or not it’s worthwhile – a case of the tail wagging the dog. The problem is that Powerpoint design is frequently fairly unprofessional, and serves only to put off your listeners, not win them over to your way of thinking. Thus something that can be a remarkable asset can all too often become a liability. How do you avoid this happening?

People communicate in three main ways. There are those who want to give and receive large reams of information; they are noticeable by their habit of going into great detail and giving you more data than you generally need. There are those who tend to communicate on a more emotional platform, interpreting a situation by the way they feel about it. They tend to be more emotive in their own communication, too, using means that resonate on that level – colourful language, illustrations and intense descriptions of their feelings. And there are those who are far more instinctive and straightforward. They tend to want to get to the nub of a matter and make a decision quickly, and are interested in only the most fundamental details. Bear in mind that when you are communicating with a group of people, it will likely contain one or more of all of these types. Therefore you need to cater for their needs. Otherwise, you will find that you miss two-thirds of your audience, simply because you’re not communicating in a way that they find easy to engage with.

In terms of Powerpoint presentations, that means you need to craft your slides as well as your talk. You should make sure you cover all three means in your Powerpoint design. For your talk, give the content you need, of course. But you should combine it with illustrations and personal stories. You should also provide a summary for those who want hardly anything more. For your slides, you can do the same. Charts and graphs convey large amounts of information. Photographs and pictures appeal to a different aspect of the audience and will register emotionally, giving them something to remember. For the third group, a simple list of bullet points will give them what they need. Make sure you cater to everyone’s preferences and you’ll find your sales presentations have a higher degree of success.

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Document processing for maximum effectiveness

Forward-thinking companies have been able to handle their invoices and other document processing completely electronically since the 1960s. But in the twenty-first century, electronic document management has transformed, with the use of software as a service (SaaS), cloud technology and other pioneering forms of new technology for business, to become almost expected in firms which take their management seriously.

Invoices, sales reports, payroll information, direct debit reports, sales orders, pay slips…

There are an endless amount of documents running around an office of almost any size nowadays. Companies which are scaling up, or which have an international presence or a complicated corporate network, nowadays usually find it absolutely impossible to manage with a manual document processing system. Those which are soldiering on with traditional administration for their sales, payments and processing departments lose an untold amount of staff hours to effectively managing an unwieldy system, while also swelling their spend on office space and equipment.

Far more effective to outsource the management of all of these documents to an efficient, tried and tested digital document processing system, whether in house, out of house or in the cloud, which can create a brilliant hassle-free solution for offices of all sizes. No need to worry about backing up, updating software or IT solutions: an efficient invoice processing firm can take care of all of that.

This also removes all the worry around security, always a concern for companies and staff working in the sensitive divisions of accounts payable and financial affairs. An outsourced document management company will guarantee security – and because it’s working on a much larger scale, by managing documents for, sometimes, hundreds of different firms, it can invest in the most up to date security storage techniques.

Completely digital financial documents are the future. In a decade or so, it will almost certainly become an industry standard. The EU has established government legislation strongly encouraging and incentivizing businesses to do all of their invoice processing electronically. And major organisations, such as the NHS, have fixed targets in place to execute electronic document management across all aspects of their work.

This isn’t just going on in Europe. In 2012, the US Government commissioned a survey which showed that if every department of the federal government switched to electronic invoicing, administrative costs would be slashed in half. This would save the US Government a whopping USD450 million every year. It’s obvious that the advantages of digital documents are not going to take long to overtake existing systems, and that the sooner a company transfers to an electronic system the more efficient it will stay.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Invoice processing makes for more effective payments systems

Efficiency is the watchword in business now. With times tough and cuts starting to hurt, there is no reason for wasting time and money doing things in a slower or more torturous way than they need to be. The catch with this, however, is in moving from one familiar way of working to a more effective set of procedures. Although these will result in improved productivity – and therefore a healthier bottom line – there will always be some resistance out of a desire to keep the status quo. Document management is one way in which efficiency can be improved. Its aim is to turn paper documents of all kinds into electronic form (via document processing) and then arrange and employ them in the best way. This is particularly helpful in certain areas of business, such as invoice processing and your accounts department.

Invoice processing is vital because the stakes here can be higher than elsewhere. For starters, you may have a significant volume of payments and transactions occurring. That means a large number of invoices. The average invoice might have a dozen fields of data on it. You could be copying these manually a number of times – into your accounting systems, payment systems, and other records. Every time it is copied there is room for error to find its way in. And there is lots of evidence that this frequently occurs, resulting in unnecessary outgoings. Properly managed, your electronic invoices can be integrated with other accounting systems, significantly reducing the time required to deal with payments and also decreasing the scope for error.

In other instances, the efficiencies of time can be just as helpful. A single paper note or document can end up on someone’s desk, buried under a sheaf of paper or accidentally thrown out. In electronic form, this is no longer an issue. It can be shared amongst any number of employees, placed in a central or shared directory on your network, and accessed at any time. (Of course, if you want it to remain confidential then there are ways of going about this too.)

Document management is therefore a vital strand of lifting the performance of any business. Continuing with paper documents is simply inefficient and, sometimes, risky. Too much can be left to chance, paperwork gets lost or damaged, and handling times are unnecessarily long. Document processing – and especially invoice processing – allows you to expedite certain procedures, spending your time and money on what really matters.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Next generation access helps ensure our wealth and our health

While a handful of underground stations in London have begun offering a free Wifi service to tube travellers, much of the rest of the nation is only just catching up above ground. It might be expected that Britain’s capital, soon to be host to the Olympic games, would offer the best in internet speed but it would be totally unjust if rural Britain were left lagging behind in future. Indeed, though we are suffering the effects of an economic programme of austerity it is important that money is not withdrawn from projects designed to improve next generation access and community broadband. Because, as people face joblessness, pay cuts, and ‘streamlined’ conditions of employment, many of the most enterprising will take it upon themselves to set up small businesses, sell unwanted or handmade goods, and even try going it alone in the freelance world. All of the above are good survival strategies when the state fails to provide us with support. But many of these strategies rely on strong ICT infrastructure.

So it emerges that excellent connectivity would boost the whole of Britain and not only those living in London and within commuting distance. Beyond the opportunity to be more business-minded, better access to the internet also helps build a more cohesive society. Web forums full of sympathy and counsel have helped many a person get through a whole range of difficulties from hands-on DIY technical hitches to emotional splits and stressful exam times. In fact, access to the internet is of increasing importance to young and old single people who are so busy in their professional lives and so set in their social habits that they find online dating the most effective and fun way to find a lover or friend.

And we hardly want to deny wonderful romantic adventures and friends to people on the sole grounds of them having poor internet service. next generation access should definitely be evenly distributed and fast will be thanks to progressive improvements in the UK’s investment in ICT infrastructure. Obviously, community broadband projects will not only help solve the local issues described above. They will also encourage British citizens to stay abreast of international goings-on and current affairs, stay in touch with friends, family and business partners abroad, and, crucially, get access to information, educational resources, entertainment and work.

Please visit http://www.broadbandvantage.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Document management for smoother tracking and storage

document management is a vital part of any company’s operations, and simultaneously reduces costs and optimises working capital. Solutions to document processing can be frustrating when the provider turns out to be unreliable, or have hidden costs. With a capable provider however, routine and necessary procedures such as invoice processing are improved.

The way to think of the situation is not as a problem to be overcome, but as capital waiting to be utilised. These assets can be gathered via the available technologies into substantial tangible and intangible benefits.

Tangible benefits of document management are many, and include the reduction of space used for paper storage, saving you commercial property costs. Integrating documentation into management systems does away with the need to store large amounts of paper documentation on site, allowing it to be stored if necessary in less expensive locations – and protects data from on-paper vulnerability to theft, fire, flood and vandalism. DMS archiving also shields important paper documents from continual and damaging handling.
What is more, as well as ensuring higher security, these systems make data retrieval more flexible and intuitive, and save time as accessing data does not even mean leaving one’s desk. Multiple indexing can be performed simultaneously, search functions are rapid and can deploy a full text search, unlike paper or microfilm. Lost files are a thing of the past, as all documents are centrally stored.

As far as regulations and requirements are concerned, DMS security and control authenticates the validity of stored files and reduces the risk of withdrawn licenses and even legal action, by demonstrating regulatory compliance. Thanks to the central control of invoice processing, DMS also greatly improves cash flow.  Less tangible benefits include improved day-to-day operations internally, increasing the amount of information accessible to staff. This also has a positive effect on customer service, allowing accurate, quick and professional response. The ability to distribute information electronically saves time and fine-tunes audience targeting, lending a competitive advantage to your organisation over others not using DMS. For those that are, it removes a competitive disadvantage.

Finally, document management opens up the pool of information which would otherwise be locked in individual’s head or separate email exchanges – or at best, ‘round robin’ emails. Once this information undergoes document processing and is made shareable and accessible, its value increases and so does your employees’ ability to solve questions and tasks. Using invoice processing keeps all your financial transactions scheduled and trackable – all in all, the simplest and smartest business solution.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Video conferencing calls that encourage collaboration

It is very common in the working world these days to communicate with colleagues and business partners via email. Electronic correspondence has the benefit of being quick, cheap and environmentally friendly; huge amounts of paper previously wasted on administration have been drastically cut in the technological age. Email is also quite obviously advantageous to businesses with overseas clients; the ability to keep in touch with people regardless of the physical distance between them is something we now just take for granted. However, email is now being superseded by more specialist technologies that not only facilitate all of the above but also restore the human aspect of digitized encounters. video conferencing, telepresence video conferencing and audio visual conferencing are three variants of such advanced inventions.

Leading companies are already investing in audiovisual communications developments because it makes their practice more competitive and sends out a signal that they value design and performance in the products they choose to use. In fact, there are few signals that could give a stronger impression of a business with its finger on the pulse than telepresence video conferencing. Above and beyond the way in which email allows for two or more people to feel closer to one another, telepresence creates a life-like sense of being in the same room as the person you are conversing with. This is because it uses life-size images of individuals that can move in real time as projections. Does this sound like something from a science fiction film? That’s because it gives us a glimpse of the future where it can be safely predicted that telepresence will catch on.

Telepresence, as we have mentioned, is just one exciting new product though. Also hot on the audiovisual telecommunications market is video conferencing that can reduce company costs by up to 60% and audio visual conferencing products that work much like Skype or a web cam and traditional telephone to help workers broadcast messages to large audiences without having to be in the same geographical location. These audio visually-assisted meetings have the added bonus of being easy to reschedule – now that we have flexi-time working hours it makes sense to embrace flexible meetings.

Please visit http://www.edgevision.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Next Generation Access Promises Change

Things are looking up for rural web users as community broadband steps up to the plate with the launch of next generation access to online services. The UK’s ICT infrastructure is developing at a fast pace, and will soon allow web users to access their favourite sites far quicker than ever before.

For a long time, internet users in rural areas have been severely disadvantaged, in comparison with users from urban areas. While traditional ‘dial-up’ internet still works as well as ever in the countryside, the increased speed of broadband services – not to mention the uncluttered phone line which broadband frees up – mean that the vast majority of users are always looking to improve their internet access with broadband services. However, the extremely different services experienced by inhabitants living in broadband ‘hot spots’ and those living in broadband ‘not spots’ are so far apart that the variation has been termed a ‘digital divide.’ Shockingly, those with connections in the ‘not spots’ pay exactly the same price for their internet connections as those in ‘hot spots,’ despite the inferior service that they receive.

The average speed of internet access, considered acceptable for everyday use at home, is 8 to 10 megabytes per second – but this figure is far from being universal. At the moment, around 4,000 households in the UK have no broadband access at all, as a result of their rural location. And there are another 2.5 million houses which only receive web access at a speed of 2.5 megabytes per second. This speed of access means that streaming videos – for instance on YouTube or on TV networks’ ‘catch up’ services – is just impossible for many country dwellers.

Luckily, more and more people in these rural households are finding solutions to this inequality. Many rural communities are forming co-operative ways of achieving faster broadband; for instance, creating their own ISPs (internet service providers) by buying their own cable connections. These are pricey, but the collaboration of local businesses or well-off residents also wins them a stake in an enterprise which may well provide returns on their investments.

This type of collaboration is known as a community broadband project, in which inhabitants of a certain region join up to find internet solutions through the power of numbers. And the prospect of next generation access, in which fibre optics will replace some of the slower copper cable through which broadband currently runs, may well change the UK’s ICT infrastructure for good.

Please visit http://www.broadbandvantage.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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