With the current proliferation of business entities in the world, competition in the market has become very stiff. Companies are looking for every possible way to win a bigger market share in order to increase revenue or improve their financial performance. They have chosen new technology as the way out. The claim by many economists that the new technology improves the productivity of a company is undeniable. It has made companies become efficient in production. For instance, mechanization of production has reduced the cost of production and increased the volume of production. It also improves workforce productivity as less work is done manually.
The competitive position of the company depends on the level of productivity because a highly productive or efficient firm will offer the best in the market. Efficient production means less production cost and a high volume of production. When the cost of production of a product is low, the price of the product will be competitive in the market, and so will do the company.
Technology growth has recently been on the upsurge and has greatly helped companies to reduce their production overheads by a reasonably big margin. Information and communication technology like teleconferencing are more beneficial technologies to a firm than the other General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). According to the article by Andy-Denis, ‘Improve Your Business Productivity with Conference Calling’ for 7th May 2009, technology is an important tool for cost reduction strategy. He demonstrated how conference calling had helped many businesses to increase productivity by reducing the cost of production. Many companies do not produce to their full capacity due to high-cost production. With the current technology, however, companies are able to increase their production. Conference call, for instance, has become easily accessible and very useful to many businesses.
Companies have benefited a lot through conference calls, for instance, the cost of Travel to deliver a message to the customers and for other business matters. With conference calls, the companies are spared of the opportunity cost of the times their personnel spends out of the office. The trips made to different places can be replaced by conference calling and production be improved greatly. This saves the company a lot of costs.
The great benefit of conferencing is too complex to sell businesses. This is because they are able to bring together parties from different locations on a single conferencing call and pull together their broad levels of expertise. This is much cheaper than contacting all patties one at a time. The expertise can also be accessed with ease and faster through conferencing.
For multinational companies with members at distant locations, conference calling serves them better. For instance, a company with members in Europe and others in America would find it hard or very expensive to bring the members together to discuss business matters. Conference calling would offer a chance to parties to participate in forums and company meetings that they otherwise would not have attended on account of extreme locations.
Also, for teams located in the same city, conferencing would increase collaboration among team parties. This is because the members work from different places in the same city. Conferencing increases cooperation among employees and regular communication is possible on a short time basis. This would otherwise have been impractical.
Information technology is more important compared to other General Purpose Technologies like a computer, internet, electricity, et cetera. This is because, information technology as proved by conference call, increases productivity, but GPTs may first decrease it. For instance, as opposed to information technology, GPTs may first reduce productivity in some ways. Firstly, they made old technologies and skills obsolete. They also have learning costs, which may cause unemployment as labor need to be readjusted. New infrastructures are also needed that may take time to develop.