Efficiency in Cloud Solutions Can Save Your Organisation in Time or Money

Membership organisations may be able to save money by having the right processes in place.  They may also be able to save time by not having to switch from one solution to another to complete a task.  All the little bits can actually add up to quite a substantial amount.

 

A Recent Article from Association Now talks about how easy hidden costs can add up - in this instance they highlight the gain made by all those little amounts as a really good example of how much it can add up to.  In ‘The Hidden Costs of Inefficiency’ Ernie Smith concludes that inefficiencies are a major money maker if you are the one offering the inefficient service. 

 

The case study looks into New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and finds the MetroCard system became an unexpected profit centre between 2000 – 2010 as passengers let $500 million in prepaid fares expire. From tourists not redeeming their cards full value to unused amounts of lost cards all of these contributed to the total. This huge amount was simply caused by New Yorkers not keeping a close eye on their balances, and once the cards expired there was no way to get that money back. Another inefficacy was in the ‘topping’ up of cards and the fee’s involved, all adding to a huge amount of money made for the MTA and the huge amount of inefficiency’s within the system.

 

This case study directly relates to technology as for years information technology has meant a lot of additional costs for organisations to support the infrastructure and often buying more than is actually needed such as server infrastructures and more. This is where cloud computing comes into play as many organisations looked to the cloud to prevent techs from spending too much on resources. Gaps can still be made in inefficiency’s if your associations cloud offerings are poorly managed. 

 

Other issues can include loss of productivity with a few seconds lost here and a few minutes there. This loss of productivity occurs when staff members are forced to work around limitations of frustrating software or incompatibilities with outside systems. This is why it’s so critical that systems can talk to one another using application programming interfaces (APIs). 

 

It is also important to consider using software as a service (SaaS) tools, to save time where staff and members can all use the system from anywhere any time.

 

All of your software systems need to be able to talk to one another in order to improve efficiencies and get back those losses in time and money. Why not have a membership software system that uses the one code base such as Member Evolution, which  runs everything off the one system all connected to the one CRM database.