Using Technology to Decrease Operating Costs
Posted on by Timothy Boyle
Businesses are always, and should always, be looking for ways to decrease their overhead and increase their profits for their own gain and the indirect gain society always experiences with such gains. Quite often though, for such decreases in overhead to take place, a new technology and a little thinking outside the box is necessary.
Depending on your type of business the relatively new technology of QR codes can be that creative way to decrease your businesses overhead, increase efficiency, and drive profit.
For example, if you are a retail store selling anything from clothes to electronic goods to food, QR codes could help decrease the need for labor, improve the customers shopping experience, and even decrease the need for commercial square footage (or allow you to increase the number of goods offered).
This could work in many ways but let’s take one example of how it might work. No matter what you’re retail store is selling one thing QR codes could do is that instead of stocking all the shelves in your store—which takes time and labor—you can simply place a single unit of each item on the floor with a QR code. The customer would then scan the QR code for each product they desired and it would be placed into their mobile shopping cart. When the customer finishes shopping they would simply pay and check out on their phone, eliminating the need for checkout lanes and employees to man the register or pack shopping bags. Meanwhile an employee or machine could be putting the physical basket together in the back and having it ready for the customer as they leave the store.
Let’s look at this a little closer to see where the costs can be cut. You would no longer need people manning your registers, and no longer need employees stocking shelves; you would need a few more employees in back putting together the shopping carts; these positions could be filled by diverting the labor of a few of the former employees, meaning a net loss in labor costs.
Depending on what you sell you could even decrease costs on things like physical shopping carts if you were running a grocery store or other now unnecessary physical accessories no longer needed by consumers.
With fewer employees needed to stock shelves and man registers some employees could also be diverted to the floor to help push sales, increasing potential sales and driving revenue. In this way you may not be losing as much in labor overhead but you would be gaining in productivity or sales, helping to increase profits despite the same overhead costs.
Obviously these possibilities are dependent on your type of business but this is at least one creative example of how a company might benefit from using QR codes. There really is no reason you can’t come up with a great possibility of your own using this great technology.
