In today's struggling economy, many businesses have faced workforce reductions, but are still trying to meet the same goals that were intended for a full staff. The key to getting through these periods is to get the most out of the people who remain. By helping to optimize your business processes, a custom intranet can increase productivity while paying for itself with saved time.

The word "intranet" generally refers to a private computer network that is only accessible within a specific organization. For our purposes, let?s think of it as a secured website and storage area that can be reached by anyone who has an account assigned by an intranet administrator. Since intranets use the same technology and tools that are used for browsing websites, there is usually little or no new equipment needed to provide access to your users. Technically, once access to this system goes beyond your local network (i.e. providing access to customers, distributers, etc) this system should be called an "extranet". However, the features we will discuss here apply to both scenarios.

The core goal of an intranet is to share data by acting as a central location where documents, customer information, project statuses and other content is located. When information from multiple sources is well organized and easy to find, we can eliminate a lot of the paperwork, phone calls, emails, and other interruptions that eat away at productive work-time. As an additional benefit, a layer of accountability is added to each task managed in the intranet. Since each task in an intranet would have a record of who did what and when, nothing should "fall through the cracks" of a well planned system.

Before beginning work on an intranet, you must first identify areas of your business that have potential to be optimized. Any paper forms that are manually filled out and passed around the office are a good place to start. In an intranet, these forms would be filled out through a web interface and saved to a database. While the current "paper" process might have an employee checking with multiple people for a status update, an intranet would allow a user to see where a task is at in real-time without disrupting anyone.

Aside from paper forms, think about which parts of your business take the most time. Are you spending a lot of time creating quotes for potential orders? Perhaps a utility that allows customers to create their own quotes is the solution. Do you spend more time tracking invoices than getting orders? A system to automatically manage invoices from the ordering system could be what you need. Every business has different needs and works in different ways. The group creating your intranet should sit down with potential users to help identify these areas and come up with a plan that best suits all of your needs.

In the end, the more work that gets done, the more money you will make. If just 10 employees are each able to gain 15 more minutes of productive work per day, you have gained an average of 50 hours of work per month. At an average of $20/hr, this has a value of $1000 per month in salary alone. A return on investment for this type of intranet could potentially be realized in less than a year while improving your ability to work at a high level