Business Productivity Report

HANSEN TECHNOLOGY GROUP - Smaller and medium size businesses generally spend an excessive amount of money on general administrative overhead because they are unable to leverage more capable business productivity technologies for these tasks. Of course, all businesses utilize core business applications for accounting, e-mail, word processing and other tasks using either commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) packages or newer hosted offerings. These have become a mainstay in the industry and it is nearly impossible to function without them.

The common office productivity tools have been around since the advent of the personal computer although they have become increasingly efficient and capable over the years. They have become the general, all-purpose tools for fixing nearly any business problem. But just like specialized factory machinery can save an enormous amount of time and replace a number of skilled workers, the same is true of modern administrative business applications. These provide detailed controls and reports with a click of a mouse, enable cost critical decisions to be made in real time, distribute the administrative burden with self-service tools, and prevent lost business opportunities with the almighty customer.

Business systems like factory machinery can increase production as well as reduce costs. They provide a variety of options tailored to specific business environments to take the guesswork out of the normal business process. To do this, each system is customized to follow day to day tasks like payroll, customer communications, human resource management, product control, sales and customer relationship management, and a host of other industry specific requirements. A few of the categories for which systems are created include:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Human Resource Management (HRM)
• Manufacturing
• Supply chain management
• Project management
• Accounting

There are systems that cover several of these categories as well as areas within these categories. Boundaries are often blurred by necessary interactions. For instance, payroll is managed by human resources but processed by accounting as well.

Historically, these business systems have been rather large and expensive. Only companies with enough users and overhead costs to reduce could realize substantial savings through the use of such systems. Most of costs associated with these systems lie in building, installing, and maintaining a server infrastructure as well as licensing and ongoing support costs. Traditional systems and the associated software are complex and costly to develop forcing vendors to recuperate those capital expenditures.

Solutions based on open source software (OSS) dramatically reduce many of these costs. Companies that are technically adept and have adequate resources can implement these solutions without the need to budget for licensing fees just to use the software. Still, this does not reduce the costs of the server infrastructure or many of the support costs. The answer to reducing these costs can be found in hosted solutions.

Hansen Technology Group specializes in hosted business productivity applications customized to fit the company's method and process. Many of these solutions are based on open source but include the level of support expected by the enterprise.