Articles on business systems, processes and implementation
Excel is one of the best tools ever made - up to a point. As a company grows, spreadsheets start acting as a system they were never designed to be. Here are the signs that tell you that moment has come.
Read article →Manual work rarely shows up in the budget - it is spread across minutes in the working day of many people. Only when you count it in hours do you see how much the company is really losing.
Read article →Not every company needs its own system. Sometimes off-the-shelf software is perfectly adequate - and sometimes it forces the company to work against its own processes. Here is how to tell these situations apart.
Read article →Contracts, annexes, declarations, summaries. If documents differ only in the employee's or client's details, preparing them by hand is one of the easiest time drains to eliminate.
Read article →Contracting companies work in many places at once. The office, construction sites, the warehouse and field crews need the same information, yet in practice they often exchange it by phone and in spreadsheets.
Read article →In many companies, the management report is produced like this: someone gathers data from several spreadsheets, stitches it into one table and sends it by email. By the time the report reaches the board, the numbers are already out of date.
Read article →System names can put people off before the conversation about a company's needs has even started. I explain in plain language how ERP, CRM and a business system built for a specific company differ.
Read article →The company has an ERP, yet employees keep spreadsheets, tables and notes alongside it. It is a common picture, and a sign that the software handles standard processes but not the ones that matter most to the company.
Read article →The most common reason implementations fail is not technology, but the fact that nobody described how the company really works. Process mapping is the stage that saves the most trouble later on.
Read article →A specification is an agreement between the company and the developer on exactly what will be built. The better it is prepared, the fewer surprises there are while the system is being built.
Read article →The riskiest way to build a system is to collect all the requirements, disappear for many months and come back with a finished product. A staged implementation delivers results sooner and lets you correct course along the way.
Read article →Contractor proposals can look very similar, and the differences only surface during the project. These questions help you spot them before you sign the contract.
Read article →A company has sales reps, managers, the accounting department and the board. Each of them needs different information. Well-designed roles make a system both easier to use and more secure.
Read article →A document is waiting for the manager’s signature, the manager is away on a business trip, and the accounting department is asking about the invoice for the third time. An electronic approval workflow removes this problem, provided it is well designed.
Read article →The form of a system should follow from where and how people work. An office, a warehouse, a construction site and a service technician’s car are completely different working conditions.
Read article →A field worker calls the office for an address, the office calls back for a status update, and the report reaches the company a few days later. A mobile app connected to your system cuts that path down to a few taps.
Read article →A dozen or several dozen vehicles, several companies and one spreadsheet with inspection dates. Fleet management quickly outgrows simple tools, and a missed deadline can be costly.
Read article →In many companies the most important “integration system” is an employee who retypes data from one program into another. It is slow, costly over a year and prone to errors.
Read article →Two people turn up to the same room, the company car turns out to be taken, and the projector is in another office. Shared resources without a booking system mean small daily conflicts that eat up time.
Read article →A group of companies often works like a single organisation: shared management, shared resources, employees moving between companies. Software and spreadsheets usually do not reflect that.
Read article →A business system holds data about your customers, employees and finances. Security is not an add-on you can bolt on at the end. These principles are worth discussing with your developer right at the start.
Read article →“Who changed this amount?”, “Why did the order disappear?”. Without a change history, questions like these end in a search for someone to blame. With one, the answer takes a moment.
Read article →A company pays for a system, and a few years later discovers it has no access to the code, the server or a full copy of its data. This is easy to avoid if the rules are agreed before work begins.
Read article →The system works, the team uses it, the project is closed. A year later it turns out the libraries are outdated, nobody has checked the backups and small fixes have been waiting for months. Maintenance prevents situations like this.
Read article →The developer ended the cooperation, the programmer left the company, or contact simply stopped. The system is still needed, and nobody knows exactly how it works. It is a difficult situation, but a manageable one.
Read article →Team resistance is one of the most common reasons an implementation fails to deliver results. People are usually not afraid of the system itself, but of changing the way of working they are used to.
Read article →Spreadsheet data is rarely ready to move. Different date formats, typos in customer names, duplicates and columns that everyone filled in their own way. Migration needs a plan.
Read article →Failed implementations rarely come down to one big mistake. Usually they are the sum of several decisions that looked reasonable at the start. Here are the ones that come up most often.
Read article →A manufacturer of windows, paints or tires does not sell on its own. It sells through a network of distributors and sellers who decide every day which product to recommend to a customer. A loyalty program makes them choose yours more often.
Read article →A customer emails to ask about an order status, a partner asks for yet another document, and the customer service team answers the same questions many times a day. A portal lets them check it themselves.
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