Reduce costs. Explore new ideas. Expand your business. In simple terms, that’s what Octane’s been helping businesses do for almost two decades.
As the owner of a small business, it’s sometimes difficult reading the terrain ahead of you — a wrong turn often has a commensurate cost associated with it.
A typical Octane client would be:
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- An SME with a tight team: some working in an office; some working on the go; or from home, perhaps.
- Has data that’s vital to the business, but it’s in different formats (sheets of paper, spreadsheet, incompatible file formats, and sometimes out of date or wrong) and in different places.
- Aware of alternative workflows, or software packages, but — as an SME with a limited budget — those alternatives are either expensive, too specific, or both.
- Employees often working to their limits, with little time to do anything else.
It’s a common scenario, one we’ve seen several times, but it isn’t intractable.
What is it that Octane does for small-to-medium sized businesses? We create fast and secure software that’s designed:
- to manage and share critical data;
- control workflows and assets (job tickets, bookings, orders et cetera) from anywhere;
- and automate project management amongst a team.
We create software specific to the needs of a business.
Simple as 1, 2, 3…
Hmm, perhaps not quite that simple, but there are 3 distinct phases to enhancing the workflow of your business. So let’s look at what Octane’s done for some of its existing clients.
1: Reducing costs
Take fictional Task X, which is costing your business 2 minutes in lost time due to inefficiencies each time it’s performed. Now let’s imagine Task X is performed once per hour:
- 2 minutes × 8 hours = 16 minutes.
- 16 minutes × 50 weeks = 800 minutes.
- 800 minutes × 3 employees = 2,400 minutes.
- 2,400 minutes is 40 hours, which at — for example — £15 per hour is £600 per annum.
So that’s one task, and I’ve seen much worse. Each time you add an employee, Task X costs your business another £200 per annum. Imagine what would happen if that process was to occur at the management level, or take 3-5 minutes.
Whether you’re in academia, event management, healthcare, or manufacturing, chances are Octane knows how to help you and your business:
- Reduce data error, loss, and duplication.
- Improve efficiencies, and provide more accurate data.
- Save costs over time (increase ROI).
- Automate complex business processes.
2: Explore new ideas
Once the first phase is complete, your business starts to save both time and costs, month over month.
- With the recovered time, we begin exploring new ideas.
- With the saved finances, we begin funding those ideas.
Both of those things were either infeasible or impractical before.
3: Expand your business
Over time, the cost benefit of the software comes into its own:
- Each new idea becomes a new method of improving services, saving time, and reducing costs.
- Enjoying an increase in the bandwidth of business processes, the team grows.
- You enter into a positive feedback loop of ideas and expansion, resulting in a growth in profits.
What would it cost?
What we do depends on what you need. However, anything from £10,000-80,000 and above over several years is not uncommon. Does that sound like a lot? As an expense, perhaps, but we deal in investments — and over the lifetime of the application, three things would be happening:
- a continual saving of time and costs;
- each new idea (as a distinct feature) would increase turnover;
- the software would be earning its keep … and then some.
Together, we build and maintain a platform that gives your business an edge over its competitors.
Questions?
If you have a question, catch us either on Twitter, our Page on Facebook, or here via the contact form.