How to Help Your Company While Working at Home – Part 2

Last week we talked about data.  Data is everywhere and produced in massive amounts.  You may ask “what is a massive amount of data”?  As I read on Forbes*, it’s estimated that 43 trillion gigabytes of data are produced EVERY DAY!  To give you a better idea of just how much data that is, we have a comparison for you using your PC. To determine how much space is available on your PC’s hard/C drive, you can go to “This PC/My Computer”. Most computers today come with 200 to 500 gigabytes.  Now imagine a hard drive with 43,000,000,000 gigabytes. That captures how much data is produced in the world in one day.

Week 4/6/2020

Now that we know there is a massive amount of data out there, let’s talk about one way data is created through business processes and how you can help your company. 

First, let’s define a business process.  A business process by definition from Wikipedia (most trusted source on the internet) is: “A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers.”

To put it simply, anything you do at your job today can be put into a business process flow chart.  Common groupings of business processes are:

Remember what I said in my last blog, “Make your job better by automating it”.  Common areas we see for highest ROI/value that are worth automating:

1. Anything that requires approval

For example, items that require multiple approvals could be:

• Capital spend 
• Journal entries
• Purchase order
• Quote/proposal/estimate

Think about all the time wasted getting physical signatures on documents OR keeping track of approvals via email or in some disconnected system. 

2. Anything that requires many steps to complete

And that’s the easy path.  If you add rejections, quality, environment, or IT related requests, you may see as many as 5 or 10 more steps. 

For example, in a traditional purchase order approval process (depending on total dollars), the approval could go from:

• Requestor
• Manager
• Controller
• VP of Finance
• President
• Board of Directors

3. Anything that is hard to track and critical to your business

For example, When your boss emailed or pinged you (remember we are working from home) and asked “Where is X?”, wouldn’t it be nice to have the ability to simply reply:

• “It’s with engineering and has been there for 2 days” OR
• “It’s with Vendor Y and they’re waiting on Z.”  

Every business is unique when it comes to what is critical, but by gaining visibility into the business process, you gain insight that you never had before. 

To you, INSIGHT is worth: <fill in the blank>.

How many people and/or steps are involved in your business process?  How critical is your business process?  Answer these simple questions and I think you will find if it’s worth automating your process.  Lastly, I leave you with this.  Wikipedia defines business process automation, aka business automation or digital transformation, as: “the technology-enabled automation of complex business processes.” 

What technology or tool are you going to use to automate your business processes?

We can help you answer that question.

Let’s #automatetogether

Contact me on LinkedIn or schedule time with me. 

*Referenced Forbes article 

In case you missed the first blog of this series, read it here