If there’s one thing that a lot of business owners treat as if it’s the holy grail of their business, it’s the idea of efficiency. After all, time is perhaps the most valuable resource in your business as a whole. It’s the only resource in your business that, once you spend it, you simply can’t get it back. However, there’s one thing that has made creating a more efficient business far easier than ever before. That is, of course, technology. With the advent of computers and the internet, making a business run more smoothly and efficiently has been getting easier and easier. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t still be pushing things forward in a significant way. With that in mind, here are some new pieces of technology that you should be using to increase the efficiency of different aspects of your business.

Project management

One of the toughest things for a lot of business owners is the fact that they have to make sure that every step in the process of producing and shipping a product is as efficient as possible. This means that you need to interact with manufacturers, logistics, marketers, and everyone else who is going to be involved in your product. Doing this can be, quite frankly, an exhausting task for most business owners, and not one that a lot of people would feel particularly willing to face on their own. Thankfully, there are plenty of pieces of project management software out there to make the whole process much easier. Things like qTest Scenario are fantastic for helping you figure out the most efficient way in which to handle each step of the production process. You can test different situations beforehand and figure out what works and what doesn’t without having to waste significant amounts of time.

Employee communication

Even in the modern, technology dominated age, just about every business owner is aware that the most important and valuable resource that they have at their disposal is their employees. However, if you can’t communicate with your employees, and they can’t communicate with each other, then things are going to become very difficult very quickly. Thankfully there are programs like Slack and Skype which make it easier to communicate with the people in your business than ever before. Now, you can get in touch with employees no matter where they are or what they’re going. This means that the potential for things like remote working and international hiring has increased a great deal over the last few years.

Marketing

Marketing has classically been something that takes up a lot of time and tends to require a great deal of effort. While that’s always going to be true, the fact that so many of your customers are now online all of the time has opened up a lot of incredibly fast and efficient marketing opportunities. Where you might once have had to call up customers or speak to them face to face in order to communicate directly, you can now use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to speak to them on a much more direct and personal level than was generally possible before.