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February 17, 2011

Benefits of Using Barcodes in Small Businesses

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , — Winson @ 4:51 AM

Barcode is termed as an optical representation of data showed on certain products. It is read by specific machines called barcode readers or barcode scanners. Symbol scanners are some of the types of scanners used in market these days. Barcode technology can also be helpful for small businesses. Small and medium sized businesses include applications of barcodes in shipping, production, packaging, warehouses, and sales. Some of the benefits of barcode applications for small businesses are listed here.

Easy to Use:
Small business operations can be made easy by use of barcodes. Using efficient barcode scanners like Symbol barcode scanners is very easy and does not require any special skills. A less costly dot-matrix printers can be used by them to create simple barcode labels.

Accurate:
Many errors arise due to manual entry of data in data collections. Barcodes are accurate and avoid these errors. In order to maintain accuracy, it is necessary to maintain creation of good quality labels. It becomes easy for barcode scanners to read effective labels.

Uniform Data Collection:
Sometimes it is required for small businesses to meet some industry specific compliance standards. Specific requirements with shipments are provided for many manufacturers, industries and other organizations. Uniform data can be collected in specific industry in a fast pace by application of barcodes. This helps in improving relations with existing clients. New clients can also be attracted which helps in enhancing sales and growth of the business.

Rise of Productivity:
Manual and routine activities of a business can be automated by using barcodes. It helps in increasing the efficiency of business processes. As manual work in data collection is less, employees can perform other important tasks of businesses. It increases the overall productivity of an organization.

Timely Feedback:
Data capture can be done rapidly by application of barcodes. Hence, an efficient timely feedback of business processes can be given. Information like the number and brand of products bought by customers can be known to a businesses at the right time.

As these benefits are associated with barcode applications in various industries, small businesses prefer to implement barcode technology.

February 8, 2011

Symantec Report on Disaster Recovery Strategies by Indian SMEs

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: — Winson @ 2:32 AM

Global SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey conducted by Symantec Corp. reported about practices of disaster recovery strategies by Indian small businesses. The report also revealed the status of India’s small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in being ready and prepared for recovery of disasters.

Natural disasters, malicious employee behavior, virus attacks, and changes in IT infrastructure were found to be main concerns for adoption of disaster recovery in India. The report revealed that data protection and recovery was taken care by IT departments in 42 percent of SMBs. Awareness on requirement and importance of disaster planning was increasing among other employees and also among small businesses. Owners and senior executives of about 39% of small businesses were involved in management and execution of disaster planning. In spite of the awareness of disaster recovery, some SMBs were not prepared for planning and execution.

The report revealed that 73 percent of respondents were satisfied with their disaster plans. Around 34 percent felt that they were protected in case of occurrence of a disaster. Most common outages were virus or hacker attacks, natural disasters, and power outages. These were prevalent among SMBs in India in 2009. However, many companies had no plan to deal with such situations. Due to lack of being prepared for disasters, SMBs had to spend a lot of amount and also lost the business.

According to the report, 18 percent of SMBs back up data on daily basis. However, only 50 percent of the company and customer data was backed up on a daily basis by some SMBs. About 59% of the customers complained loss of important data. As a result, materials and presentations were referred by SMBs for preparing a recovery plan. The report found that about 91% of the SMBs had no formal disaster preparedness plan.

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