According to the report, only 22% of South West businesses are gaining a transactional benefit from online trading. International digital practise is even lower, and only 7% of South West businesses use their digital skills in exporting. The Lloyds Index suggests that if South West businesses could make use of digital skills commercially, they could generate £85 billion in total turnover. 

 

Only 8% of businesses use digital channels (such as search browsers or social media) to discover growth opportunities. Apparently 35% of South West SMEs don’t feel the need to develop their cybersecurity. This is a vital part of the modern business. Even if the business is so old-fashioned that they don’t have any information online for hackers to steal i.e. their website is just a page or two with location and contact details, their reputation could still be destroyed if someone hacks into that and replaces it with unsuitable content. 

 

Embracing technologies such as cloud IT, online accounting software and digital training tools can result in higher turnover, attracting more clients and saving up to a full day’s worth of time in a week. 

 

Stephen Noakes, Lloyds Banking Group’s Ambassador for the South West, said: “The South West is home to more than 71,000 enterprises and is the base for some of the country’s leading names in digital, technology and manufacturing.

 

“As the world becomes more connected, it’s important for businesses and charities to have a strong online presence and the digital capabilities to attract new business or supporters, both in the UK and overseas. With this in mind, it’s disappointing to see that just 22 per cent and seven per cent respectively of SME organisations are using their digital channels to do this.

 

“With more than 1,600 specially trained digital champions in the South West, we are helping the region’s businesses and charities develop their skills to facilitate growth, as part of our Helping Britain Prosper plan. Over the coming 12 months we will continue to provide free to access training events for SMEs, to help them close the digital skills gap.”

 

Source: BusinessLeader.co.uk

 

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It is a surprising but true fact that even companies in the technology sector, who work hard every day to solve people’s problems with technology, can end up using very low-tech solutions for basic employee management tasks. 

 

The prime example of this is wasting countless sheets of paper in measuring attendance. Examples of this are numerous: paper timesheets for hourly staff, visitor sign-in sheets for health and safety and security, holiday booking forms … All of these need to be approved and/or signed by multiple people, which wastes time that would be better spent elsewhere. Every time a form passes through human hands, the chance of an innocent error occurring increases – and that’s not even getting started on the possibilities of time fraud. Finally, working like this is also a massive waste of paper, since these documents are generally only used once before they’re thrown away. 

 

Here at Time and Attendance South-West, we offer powerful specialised software which can gather all this data for you and present it in an easy to understand format. This can be useful for many different departments.

 

Our time and attendance management system (hardware and software) takes the labour out of payroll hours and helping HR spot attendance problems by collecting employees’ clocking data and recording it in the central database. This data can be easily checked and processed by multiple departments, and reports can be generated using our step-by-step wizard or advanced reports settings depending on user requirements. 

 

Often in small companies the receptionist role suffers, since it is taken on piecemeal by staff members who have other tasks. When not performed as a speciality, the receptionist task can also be very inefficient. Our Visitor Management System and Self-Service Visitor Management App combine to create a self-sufficient check-in area, so that reception can be left completely unmanned if you wish. What used to be “getting visitor to sign the sheet with their details and pick up a pass and ring their contact to say they’ve arrived and tell them where to sit while they wait,” becomes utterly streamlined into the press of a few buttons. 

 

Another way in which an automated system can improve your processes is in the health and safety response to fire alarms. This combines your existing fire alarm with our time and attendance/access control system. Hooking up your fire alarm to our system means that when the alarm is triggered, our WinTA.NET system will tell a printer (often positioned right next to the door) to print a list of everyone who is registered as being clocked in. This is much faster and more accurate than the usual method of reading off a list of all employees, or worse, relying on managers to do department headcounts!