Operations, Technology

Every company needs to take a moment and think about what they are doing.
Mike Tinz, VP at Money Mailer, a leader in direct marketing opportunities for local businesses offers the following tips:

While under heavy attack, the neighborhood Mon-and-Pop store survives successfully in today’s world.
Based on his company’s interaction with these establishments, Laurent Therivel, Senior Vice President, Small Business Solutions, AT&T offers five tips on growing even the smallest business.

The growth in toys designed to teach coding and other IT related skills is moving exponentially and at a world-wide basis.
One of the latest such toy-tool is Cubetto, the award winning, Montessori-approved coding toy for children ages 3 and up.
Cubetto is the only screen-less programming system, powered by a revolutionary coding language made of colorful blocks that lets children write their first computer programs.

As more and more consumers purchase prepared food rather than cook at home, the currently attractive margins for such offerings face mounting challenges.  Not the least are labor costs, which are under pressure from economic and regulatory trends.  Integrating higher labor costs into the pricing algorithm represents the next major challenge for food sector leaders.

Whether a neighborhood deli, central food kitchen, gourmet restaurant, or fast casual franchise the need to find ways of doing more with the same or fewer employees is expected to become more important in 2017.

All businesses look similar at the highest level of function and operations. Whether a $25 million or $500 million company, the same basic blueprint of business functions – sales, marketing, operations, customer service, IT, finance and HR – are required.

Many small businesses have intranet systems but not all have the right tools in place to make them efficient.

Chris Pyle, CEO of MessageOps offers these tips to build and use an effective intranet.

Small businesses increasingly are opting to outsource more of their IT operations because they either don’t have the resources to handle programing and other such functions, or they simply want to focus more on other initiatives.

According to Derek Schauland a business analyst for Cloudberry Labs, “although many small businesses began outsourcing when the economy took a nosedive in 2008, now that the economy is growing once again, Small businesses are still taking a “do more with less” approach to IT.“

Small-business owners have had to learn pretty quickly when it comes to provisioning, deploying, maintaining and optimizing new technologies.

American business leaders have identified robotics as a major source of jobs for the nation’s youth with many openings currently unfilled.

In a poll of 200 senior corporate executives on what industrial sectors they thought the most jobs would be created for our nation’s youth during the rest of the decade 81% mentioned robotics as a top five area.

The poll was conducted for the National Robotics Education Foundation (NREF) by Information Strategies, Inc. (ISI) in April-July, 2015.

In the name of improving chances of catching fraud or cyber threats small business leaders must sometimes opt for some customer inconvenience.

The majority of small business leadersare concerned about breaches to their Internet and electronic security, according to the August 2015 SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard optimism survey.