I worked with a company that would routinely send out 6,000 invoices a quarter. Some were in e-mail form, but the vast majority were paper based. Upon seeing that situation I asked, “Why don’t we go electronic?”
The response to that question ranged from, “customers don’t like it that way,” to “the system does not do that.”
“OK, so got it, we are going to stick to paper. How are we printing and mailing these?” “Oh, we just use the printer in the office and then the admin staff folds and stuffs the envelopes and then we put stamps on them.”
This is a real situation I ran into; this is not a made-up scenario to prove a point. I pushed for changes and there was a lot more resistance than I could have imagined. “Got it, so how about we get a folding machine.” “What is that?” I got as a response. For those of you who are not familiar, there is a whole industry who specializes in printing, folding and then stuffing envelopes with your invoices, marketing materials and more. Do you believe that all that junk mail you get at home is done by hand? No, it is all done by machine.
So, why would anyone spend the time and labor to print 6,000 invoices, fold them by hand, stuff envelopes by hand and stamp by hand? The answer is usually, “That is how we always did it.”
This example is a simple view of how a growing business must learn to adapt to its own size. The process and procedures that you used to get you where you are, say a $2M a year to a $20M a year business, will not work to get you to where you want to go, like $100M. It also shows you how people become set in their ways and won’t move off of what has worked before to make things faster and cheaper.
The cost of 3 or 4 people folding for just 1 quarter more than paid for a folding machine. So, the company bought one, set it up, showed the person responsible for invoicing how to use it and guess what…. It sat unused. So, just the economic benefits are not enough, someone has got to want to change! Someone has to drive the change.
Similar examples can be found throughout companies. Why would you type up the same email to a customer 20 times a day when you could set up a template in Outlook that would require you to only fill out one or two fields. Think about a form that you fill out that has your companies address, EIN, License info, etc. The information is mostly standard, so why not automate it? “Oh, no one told me I could do that,” is the most common response or, “I did not know you could do that,” is the other.
Outlook lets you set up standard templates for outgoing e-mail. You can pre-populate a form that is used for a particular process. Maybe the only thing you need to do is change the order number, the date or other minor things. So, why retype it each time?
The key to process improvement, cost reduction and efficiency increases is to look at what it is you are doing and ask, “Is there a better way?” Or, more effectively, “There must be a better way!”
Automation and especially computer automation have revolutionized many industries, but those improvements are not only available to large corporations. Anyone can benefit from the mentality of “set it and forget it” when computers are involved.
Are there tasks in your office that people just keep doing because that is how they have always done it? Are there tools you are already using, like Microsoft Office, that have built in automation and no one has figured out how to use them in your business? If you have those kinds of questions and would like some help figuring it out, just drop us a line at rick@gramatges.com
Gramatges Consulting 