5 Ways to Optimize Your Small Business Operations with Zoho One
ZOHO One | March 11, 2021, By Bob Ritter.
Operations management is the internal systems and processes that powers a business. The success of your business depends on the efficiency of its operations. Small businesses can optimize, streamline, and improve their effectiveness with tools that enhance collaboration and productivity. Zoho One has gained a reputation for being “the operating system for business.”
Zoho One is a suite of 45+ applications all under one log-in that address all the major categories of needs that businesses have in order operate. Zoho One addresses:
- Sales & Marketing
- Email & Collaboration
- Business Process
- Finance
- IT & Help Desk
- Human Resource
Under each category are specific software applications designed for each of the related function. In this article we will focus on the tools that Zoho One offers to enhance operational collaboration and productivity.
Top features of Zoho for business operations:
- Improve communication & collaboration across teams
- Plan and track work with project management tools
- Manage inventory, orders, and invoices seamlessly
- Create custom apps for unique business processes
- Track projects, utilize resources, and bill accurately,
- Manage your entire business within a single solution
Zoho One for Operations Management
Zoho has many applications to help with operating an organization. Highlighted below 5 essential areas and an explanation of specific applications that Zoho offers.
1. Build high-performing teams with effective team collaboration
Zoho Cliq | Zoho Connect | Zoho Social Intranet | Mobility
Zoho One offers collaboration tools that streamline team communication, increase team transparency and visibility, make cross-team collaboration easier, and enable your organization to have productive team meetings.
Zoho team chat solution Cliq is an immediate value add
Communicate with an individual or a group via chat/audio/video
- Communicate with clients and vendors outside your organization
- Stay updated on your business through bots
- Automate tasks and perform faster and easier
- Plan and manage events easily with Zia
- Communicate on the go with mobile apps
Zoho Connect, team collaboration software, brings together people and resources in one place
- Encourage multi-directional communication
- Provide an intranet solution to bring all employees together
- Share ideas and plan on tasks together
- Build and automate workflows to save time and effort
- Use Groups, Forums, Town Hall, Feeds, and Channels to discuss in real-time
- Bring work files to one place and get work done faster
- Create boards and sections for teams to manage work effectively
- Get a Kanban view of tasks and track the progress of work
Zoho mobile apps for increased business mobility
All Zoho applications are mobile ready. Users can access any application on any device, on any platform from any location.
With Zoho One’s collaboration software, your business can bring people and resources to one place, keep your employees engaged and productive, and get work done easily.
2. Streamline your team communication to improve efficiency
Zoho Workplace | Zoho Meetings | Zoho Office Suite | Zoho Messaging
In Zoho One, you get team communication tools to organize conversations and information in one place.
You and your teams can plan and execute projects and tasks together and manage everything else from a central hub. With better communication, you can improve process efficiency within your team and boost productivity.
- Zoho Workplace: It bundles apps for email, document management, presentation, chat and other communication tools to help you communicate more effectively and get work done more viably.
- Zoho Meetings: Host online meetings with colleagues and customers, anytime, anywhere.
- Zoho Office Suite: Use Zoho Office suite to manage documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in real-time and get things done quickly.
- Zoho Team Messaging: Chat with team members using dedicated channels, across devices and stay on track with your planning and tasks.
Zoho One offers a business communication software suite that helps you bring teams, actions, and tasks together in one place and get work done faster, smarter.
3. Make every project successful with your preferred methodology
Project Management | Task Management | Project Tracking | Sprints | Timesheet Tracking
Whether you build products, sell products, or provide services, you need to manage each project to make it successful. Zoho One provides a range of project management tools to get more word done using your preferred methodology.
You get Zoho Projects with Zoho One that keeps your entire team engaged in different projects with collaborative features like the Feed, Forums, chat, documents, and Gantt chart. Use agile methodology or waterfall project management methodology based on types of projects and your management style.
Key features of Zoho’s project and task management tools:
- Break projects into milestones, task lists, assign work, and manage resources.
- Use Gantt charts to plan projects and track task schedules.
- Automate tasks to make it easier to visualize and deploy.
- Use Projects Timesheet module to log billable and non-billable hours
- Use Zoho Invoice to automatically generate invoices from your timesheets.
- Manage team workload online, get updates, and plan future work using reports.
- Update tasks on the go with Zoho Projects mobile app.
- Set task reminders and duration for important milestones.
Use Zoho Sprints – An agile tool for product management teams
- Work with your product teams to plan and launch products customers love.
- Sprints helps you increase transparency and productivity & bring agility.
- Check progress and track your release schedules.
- Integrate Sprints with your code repositories and CI/CD tools.
- Collaborate with multiple teams and tools to get things done faster.
4. Fulfill orders and services to meet customer expectations
Inventory Control | Warehouse Management | Multichannel Selling | Order Management Order Fulfillment
Zoho One offers inventory and warehouse management tools that streamline your order and fulfilment processes. You can manage, monitor, and measure the success of your orders and services from one central dashboard. With advanced analytics and custom reports, you can get a view of your sales and purchase orders and stay ahead of competitors.
Zoho’s integrated multichannel inventory software allows you to:
- Update inventory information across all your channels automatically
- Manage product listings and keep them organized
- Automate re-ordering process with preferred vendors
- Manage barcode inventory and product stocks
- Sell on multiple channels like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify
- Fulfill orders efficiently from different channels
- Buy and sell in multiple currencies
- Measure the selling channel performance with insightful reports
- Integrate different payment gateways and get paid faster
Zoho’s warehouse management software allows you to:
- Manage multiple warehouses from a single application
- Connect the flow of stock between your store and warehouses
- Deliver faster and reduce costs with warehouse fulfilment optimization
- Track transfer orders from one warehouse to another
- Get better insights into each warehouse’s sales and purchase trends
Zoho’s order management and fulfilment software allows you to:
- Manage sales and purchase orders efficiently
- Create and print product packages and slips
- Manage real-time shipping rates
- Track packages post-shipment
- Receive online payments right after delivery
- Integrate with more than 40 shipping carriers
- Create a drop shipment and get post-shipment updates
- Generate reports to identify profitable products
5. Build apps and get business intelligence to grow your business
Creator | Analytics | Zia Artificial Intelligence
To differentiate your small business and gain a competitive advantage sometimes as business will chose to create custom apps and apply greater use of business intelligence. Some business’s processes are so unique that they require customized systems to operate. A business smaller business can topple competitors and take a market or industry by storm with a better business process, not just a better mouse-trap.
Zoho One offers tools for building your process without the need for teams of developers with expensive coding skills.
Build, integrate, and extend your business with custom solutions
Zoho One offers Zoho Creator, a low-code platform, to build multiplatform applications the way you want. As a small business, you have a limited budget and team. Why waste money on outsourcing application development projects when you can build them in-house with Zoho Creator. From simple call logs to complex ERPs, build anything with drag-and-drop builders, code editors, and prebuilt templates.
Make smarter decisions with better analytics tools
You could say that Zoho has a mind of its own. Zoho has a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Zia throughout its platform. Zia blends data to help you reveal hidden insights about your business.
Zia is a self-service business intelligence (BI) and data analytics software. Zia is able to blend data from different sources and intelligent enough to answer questions and generate reports. Plus Zia is always learning, so the more you challenge it, the smarter it gets.
Zoho Analytics is a fully featured business intelligence application which is included with Zoho One. Zoho Analytics is easy to use and has an intuitive user interface (UI), making it easier for everyone in your company to navigate the product’s functionality.
Zoho Analytics can collect data from various sources such as databases, cloud storage, and your offline or online applications. You can utilize these data to merge, format, clean, split, and calculate feeds, without any coding skills or IT’s help. With Zoho’s BI and data analytics software, you can track key business metrics, identify outliers, see longtime trends, predict sales and leads, and unearth hidden insights. Some of the key features of Zoho Analytics:
- Easily accessed on the web from any browser
- Easy drag and drop interface for report creation
- Streamlines data gathering from different sources
- Data visualization for building reports and dashboards
- Simplifies creation of charts
- You can set intelligent data alerts
- Share and publish reports with teams
Differentiate and innovate faster with Zoho’s Creator and Business Intelligence tool to build a great business.
Conclusion
Zoho One is the “operating system for business.” It’s integrated applications meet a full spectrum of operational needs under one log-in with one central point for administration.
Zoho One is ideal for small businesses and available at an unbeatable price. No other company offers so much, 45+ applications in one bundle at one affordable price: ~$1.5 per employee per day when billed annually.
And it does all this in an award-winning fashion! Check reviews and analyst views on Zoho One here.
Contact First Direct Corporation
As a Zoho Authorized Partner, First Direct is here to help you implement Zoho applications and realize better results. As your implementation partner, we work closely with you to integrate your business processes with Zoho One. First Direct provides talent, skill and human resources to augment your own internal team.
Learn why ZOHO ONE is the Operating System for Your Business
