Inflation, along with the rise in prices of essential products and services, as well as increased salary levels for IT specialists, are factors in running a business that often contribute to financial difficulties and potential bankruptcy. Restructuring can be a solution for companies, enabling them to implement new business models and optimize investment costs.
What causes financial problems for companies?
What most commonly leads companies to insolvency are increases in electricity and fuel prices, rapidly rising inflation, and price hikes. The level of digitalization in Poland, which remains relatively low, also plays a significant role in market competitiveness. Taking steps towards digital transformation still poses a major challenge for many businesses.
Moreover, the rapidly increasing labor costs, especially among IT industry employees, are already causing financial difficulties for companies and challenges in retaining specialists for the long term. This impact is felt most strongly by small and medium-sized enterprises, often lacking significant financial resources. In the second quarter of the previous year, as revealed by Eurostat research, Poland was one of the countries with the fastest-growing labor costs – emphasizes Robert Czarniewski, CFO at Polcom.
How can financial problems in companies be addressed?
Restructuring is often the only viable solution and a way to address operational problems. However, before companies decide to take such a step, it is worth trying other methods. These may include:
- Reducing office space or switching to coworking
- Attempting to reduce fuel costs and office maintenance expenses by transitioning to remote work
- Decreasing the number of business trips
- Insuring equipment to avoid paying for potential breakdowns
- Implementing the circulation of e-documents
Among the ways to save costs in a company, outsourcing IT services, including cloud solutions, can be mentioned. Based on our experience, companies are eager to adopt cloud computing in the face of restructuring. Companies facing difficulties observe significant savings from such solutions. Maintaining one’s own IT infrastructure is expensive, requires expertise and specialists, and their availability is increasingly challenging. It must be acknowledged that the number of IT specialists has significantly increased. In Poland, it reached almost 555,000 in 2020, but it is still insufficient to meet the challenges of business driven by accelerated digitization due to the pandemic. The demand for IT professionals makes it difficult to retain true talents in a company for a longer period. Moreover, digital threats are becoming more frequent and increasingly specific, thus more difficult to detect. This means that companies prioritizing data security and business continuity cannot overlook this aspect in their IT investment plans. The final cost analysis of purchasing and maintaining one’s own infrastructure often reveals that outsourcing not only helps survive in challenging times but also improves the profitability and cash flow of companies – says Robert Czarniewski.
A step towards digital transformation is necessary
The pandemic undoubtedly highlighted issues in companies that relied on traditional IT infrastructure and struggled to respond to the changes caused by COVID-19.
One of the key roles of IT is to develop solutions that make maintaining business continuity and flexibility in response to evolving market needs not a difficult challenge to achieve.