How do companies use technology?
The role technology plays in today’s world is irreplaceable. Technology does shape the way employees do their work to a great extent. At Saucey, it is used for menial tasks like making calculations, and for much more complex tasks like analyzing large volumes of data and managing the app and website which enables people to have alcohol delivered to their doorstep. Technology is used in some way or the other for almost every task performed.
Saucey, much like any other startup, uses several tools and software to complete daily tasks and ensure business operations flow smoothly. There are a few tools and software that employees throughout the company use. Apart from the common tools like Microsoft Office, Dropbox, and several others, I was introduced to Slack and Looker.
Slack is a great tool to enable companywide communication and department-specific communication. This ‘collaboration hub’ is an effective way to share files, have specific channels for communication for particular topics, communicate via video call and take advantage of the numerous integrations it allows including Dropbox, Google Drive and many more. As an Operation Intern, I’m a part of some operations specific channels like ‘ops’, ‘menusweep’ and some companywide channels like ‘hq’, ‘saucey-social’, ‘general’ and a few others. This enables team members in the same department to stay in the loop regarding department specific updates and helps keep in touch with company updates as well. This tool takes advantage of technology to streamline effective communication and helps bring employees together. Looker is a tool used by most employees to explore, analyze and present data in an easy manner. At Saucey, employees use data to make decisions and recommend changes. On Looker, there are ‘Explores’ for each department, with looks and dimensions based on department-specific data. I use Looker on a daily basis and the ‘Ops’ explore specifically, which has data about Couriers, Customers, Order Costs and a lot more, to understand more about operations related real-time data.
Particularly for the operations department, Saucey manages couriers and aims for 30-minute deliveries, due to which it requires a dispatch team that uses some tools built from scratch. One of them is a dashboard to look at deliveries being made in real-time, to be able to communicate with the customers regarding their deliveries and with the couriers to solve any possible obstacles they face during their delivery, for example, an issue with ID scan. I used this tool to look at current delivery zones for each city that Saucey currently operates in, and make recommendations for expansions based on average delivery times from the store.
As a whole, this company runs on software and tools that are tailored to help complete tasks. Working in several cities can be a problem, but tools like Slack enable communication within the company, which helps eliminate communication issues. At the end of the day, technology helps us complete these tasks in an efficient manner, saving time and enabling workers to create high-quality work.