Serious business - More for less

Productivity is one of those buzzwords that frequently gets over-used and mis-applied. Yet its importance to the health of an organisation of any size is beyond question. In a SoHo context it's up there with the likes of sound planning, tight cash flow management and effective marketing as a critical success factor. We're defining productivity here in its most common form - what dictionaries usually describe as 'production per unit of effort'. Improving productivity therefore simply means getting more work done for a given effort or in a given time. Inverting that, we also talk of performing the same work or achieving the same results with less effort or in less time.

Few would dispute the potential of computers to contribute dramatically to this, even if realising it in practice sometimes proves surprisingly difficult. Nevertheless, virtually any small business can get solid productivity gains out of the PC. Providing you resist the temptation to keep changing your software, requiring substantial re-learning, you can achieve some of these gains without even trying.

But it's much more fruitful to take a disciplined approach. The starting point is to identify your tangible business outputs. The possibilities here span a huge spectrum: pages typed, contracts clinched, letters answered, works of art committed to canvas, etc.

These outputs in turn identify the type of PC applications you need to install: word processing, basic accounting, image editing, Web searching, contact management or whatever. To select a particular supplier's product (or change it later for something better), it's then a matter of looking hard at the productivity impact you can expect. In focused applications (label printers, tax return generators, payroll calculators, invoice creators ), comparisons with non-computer alternatives usually make the gains glaringly obvious. Consider manually sorting and retyping a few hundred customer names, or adding up a year's income and expense transactions.

Many other PC applications offer productivity improvements across a much broader front. The classic illustration is the integrated office suite. While the actual degree of integration might sometimes be less than suppliers claim, there's no denying the advantages that stem from the standard look and feel of their components, the simplicity of access from one place, and the ease of transferring data between them. Although traditionally targeted primarily at corporate users, these suites now offer extraordinary value for the SoHo user too.

For example, Microsoft Office 2000 Small Business combines what Microsoft labels 'four productivity applications' (Word, Excel, Outlook and Publisher), plus a set of small business tools. Using this or similar suites you can achieve productivity gains in many obvious areas. You can quickly produce marketing materials such as brochures, presentations and mailshot letters; pursue additional business via direct mail, e-mail or fax; make it easy for your customers to find information about your products or services via the Web; and keep track of customer contacts, account status and appointments.

Used intelligently, such software also contributes to your productivity in a less direct way, but with significant results, by offering ways to make more informed business decisions. For example, locally it lets you track key sales, expenses, cash flow and customer credit data, and lets you find additional information on your industry, market or competitors using the Web.

Everyone will have their own personal favourite PC productivity tool. For many, pride of place might go to the hot key macro that enters their name and address. For start-up businesses Word's Mail Merge might be numero uno. For a researcher or consultant, the middle leg joints of the Apoidea flying insect species might be the Copernic 99 Web Searcher.

But whether you use Edit/Copy, Ctrl+c, a toolbar icon or a click of your customised mouse, for most of us it must surely be a much more familiar facility. Can you imagine how much longer your PC chores would take without Top of the Productivity Pops, the ubiquitous Windows Clipboard?

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