Three Ways Our Customers Are Fighting the Recession

The economic climate as of late has become demonstrably unstable and, as a result, many businesses are battening down the hatches and making preparations for the upcoming fiscal year. This means cutting down on operating costs, eliminating projects that don’t have an immediate impact on the bottom line, and implementing other cost-cutting initiatives.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be publishing a lot of material which will provide you with some ideas to help you find ways to tighten your belts. Today we’re going to provide you with a preview.

Here are three strategies that we’ve received from customer case studies regarding how they’ve improved their bottom lines in the face of recession:

A Major U.S. Health System Saved $1,000,000 per Month by Optimizing Processes

The more time a patient spends in a hospital, the greater the cost to the hospital. So it is no wonder that one of our customers, a major U.S. non-profit healthcare system, was under the gun to increase its patient throughput. By documenting the existing hospitals’ business processes with flowcharts, our customer was able to identify and correct major inefficiencies throughout the healthcare system’s operations. This netted them a savings of roughly one million dollars per month as a result of increased patient throughput.

A Small Business Saved $20,000 per Year by In-Sourcing Marketing Materials

A small business that specializes in brokering industrial property solutions was able to save approximately $20,000 per year by drawing a large portion of its own marketing materials, namely floor plans and landscapes, using a copy of our software instead of relying on expensive third-party graphic artists to do the work.

A Major Charity Saves 100 Person-Hours per Month by Improving Project Management

A major charitable organization in the U.S. uses SmartDraw routinely to create training materials using flowcharts and mind maps. These types of diagrams are self-explanatory and thus require less explanation and communication with instructors. Most recently, they took advantage of SmartDraw’s project management capabilities to simplify a major IT system migration, saving the organization even more time and money. The charity estimates that its routine use of these visual management and communication mechanisms helps them save roughly 100 person-hours per month.

In the upcoming weeks, we’re going to be publishing an extensive amount of material which will tell you how to recession-proof your business and get the most of your organization during economically turbulent times—so stay tuned!

Discussion: How Are You Cutting Costs?

We’re pleased to share with you some stories of how other SmartDraw customers are saving money in the down economy by cutting costs. But we’d also like to encourage you to share your success stories with us here on the blog by leaving a comment below. How have you been able to cut costs in the face of a possible recession? Have you found any of the techniques that you’ve read about on Working Smarter to be helpful?

Please let us and other readers know!

If you want to try building your own mind maps, project charts, flowcharts, or anything else mentioned in this article then you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.

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