A typical day at a client site last week might help to demonstrate how we make ourselves useful. This customer takes advantage of block hours to enable their business with smooth running systems.

We began the day well before regular business hours troubleshooting a complaint of slow computers. Some investigation turned up a Microsoft SBS 2003 server with an incorrect DNS configuration. Resolving this dropped login times from 3 minutes to less than 20 seconds. Quickbooks login improved from almost 4 minutes to less than 15 seconds. Woo Hoo. It feels like the Army. More accomplished by 7am than some people do all day.

We're also helping this client on a project to define, select, and implement software to automate their service business. The owner wanted to reduce the office labor involved in manually writing work orders over and over. We reviewed their business processes and suggested that much more cost savings were available by better managing field staff overtime. With over 500 hours scheduled daily some field staff were into overtime with 3 days left in the pay cycle. We also found there was a delay sometimes in excess of 40 days between when major blocks of work were completed and finally invoiced to their customers for payment. This was caused by manual processes that had not evolved as quickly as the company was growing. It was clearly limiting the company. How to solve it? This company didn't have the budget for a custom solution or a big ticket ERP. We brought a sound approach of succinctly defining the existing business process, the gaps, and what a new work flow must support. Armed with this information we identified a short list of vendors capable of meeting the needs while not breaking the bank.

So now back to our typical day. When operations staff arrived we reviewed training materials prepared by gistlink and tailored specifically to their business process to support their scheduling and work order functions. The materials jump start the learning process and within a few hours the operations manager says “scheduling will be a piece of cake now”. Not only did we automate the scheduling process we just added capacity management and overtime rules that will help reduce labor costs by 10% or more. Suggestions are added to the process improvement journal maintained on a website accessible only by the stakeholders in the project. It's just before noon. Next?

Now it's time to address the delay between the company completing major blocks of work and producing an invoice to get paid for that block of work. In our gap analysis we identified thorough bidding processes with an incomplete transition from operational to accounting. A mid office process to properly define and prepare phases would allow the new software to turn a work order into an invoice one day after completing the phase. That's a significant cash flow improvement. As we are reviewing the system use to support that change one of the owners arrives with a virus plagued laptop. A reboot into safe mode and a thorough scan with an anti malware tool is kicked off while we test processing the new work flow.