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Problems and Solutions

What problems are you facing? How can you solve them?

In my experience companies often face problems in what they think of as routine processes: design, accounting and customer relationships. We have found that using spreadsheets - Excel typically - more comprehensively can provide you with excellent business tools at a fraction of the price of special software. For example, how often do you send out invoices, creating them in one system and recreating the addresses in another. The same goes for keeping track of your customers and keeping in touch with them. There are ways of merging a host of things to use the same information for many purposes to save you time, making your processes more efficient, and reducing errors. Please give me a call to discuss the problems you are facing or drop me a line.

Some examples:

• Bad data caused by repeated data entry or no quality control or lack of control over who changes it.
  • Why does this matter?
  • Errors in customer relationship management;
  • Repeated records for the same people;
  • Wrong addresses
  • Leading to unhappy customers with inevitable consequences for your cashflow..
• Errors in financial information and your accounts
  • Lost invoices,
  • Wrong invoices,
  • Unpaid bills;
  • Bills paid twice.
• Poor estimates
  • Underpricing
  • Omissions
  • Inconcistency with one customer
  • Inconcsistent with everyone
  • Leading to underpricing, low profits and unhappy customers

There are two main causes:

• Poor processes
• Poor data management

Some examples - necessarily invented but you might recognise some of these:

Many local authorities had - and perhaps still have - separate databases for property addresses. Even if these were all accurate, how much time was wasted in creating and maintaining them when they could all use one set of property data and link the many departments to that central set of data?

Some organisations separate the production of accounts and the production of invoices although both can use the same information. Apart from wasted effort in retyping the same information, there are inevitable errors with typing information more than once.

Organisations often need to use the same information in multiple letters, emails and reports. Perhaps some of this can be geerated more automatically. Would this save you time and ensure that you are providing a consistent, high quality service to your customers and suppliers?

I expect that you can think of other problems and would like to solve them. Please give me a call to discuss this or drop me a line.