“What Do You Mean You Don’t Have Time?”

Written by Lou Romano of Synergy

Have you heard this statement before from peers or colleagues?  Is everyone so overloaded with work that it takes weeks to schedule a meeting?  Were you enjoying summertime and the next time you were able to peek your head out of your office, you realized you missed Christmas?  Time management is a challenge every company faces but sometimes it’s not high enough on the radar to move the needle enough to address it.  Sudden growth of business or the designs of the current processes sometimes mask the need to take a closer look at what employees are doing.  Most management sees busy workers and thinks that everything is fine but the fact is they could be wasting money and resources on tasks that can be automated or have a process improved.

So what can be done in these instances?  Sometimes we can help ourselves by just looking at the data.  Establishing primary vendors on part IDs or attaching a drawing file in the part master.  Connecting contacts to vendors or customers for easy reference.  Setting up specific items to auto issue on work orders or setting up a user defined field to have specific information that might be needed that is readily available to prevent the user from needing to look elsewhere can be a time saver.

A lot of times it is not that simple a solution.  One of the benefits I’ve noticed of VISUAL ERP compared to other ERP systems that I’ve worked with is its flexibility and adaptability.

There have been times where a process is established and believed to be in the best interest of the company but soon comes the realization that the manual effort to maintain such a process is daunting and inefficient even though the process captures all the steps the company wants to track.  For such cases a programming solution might be available.

There was one instance a high level manager was approving all credit card orders within VE.  This was taking him up to two hours per day depending on how many orders were received that day as each individual order had to be processed and approved.  This manger was also needed to make adjustments to packlists due to additional changes in the order.  A programming solution was developed so that only credit card orders that were considered exceptions (over limit, expired due date) needed to be reviewed as well as the functionality to make adjustments to any specific packlist via the packlist ID number and then the process was completed by running a batch.  Instead of two hours daily, now the tasks can be completed in significantly less time allowing this manager to focus on more pertinent matters.

This tends to happen in every industry both big and small.  As companies develop their processes to be more robust and capture more data, they also tend to become more complicated and constantly need user maintenance in order to maintain their efficiency to meet their overall designed goals.  Is your company currently employing a manual process that is taking too much of your time?  There may be a solution to implement some automation to improve corporate workflow efficiency.  Wouldn’t that worth a conversation?  Synergy can help, please contact us.