Workflow Reviews and Process Servers...
We have been providing workflow reviews since 1990, and after
having identified a need, process servers since 1992. Our
experience includes reviews of divisions within Fortune 500 firms
down to small companies. In most firms, an initial workflow is
created in a logical, well designed manner by the firm's
management. Over the ensuing months and years, additional
requirements get set upon this department or that one, bogging
down the original workflow design. Additionally, in most
scenarios, workers tasks are rarely automated in any great part,
such automation having been made available after the inception of
the original workflow. In all the years of providing these
services, we have only once found an operation so well designed
that even years after it started, we couldn't provide any
significant savings. Thus, our guarantee on workflow reviews --
we guarantee to save you more if our recommendations are
implemented than the fees you will be charged.
Now, for some real world examples:
CUSTOMER: Tampa Office of a national Fortune 500 advertising
firm.
SCENARIO: We were initially called in to provide maintenance and
upgrades to various computers, and we fulfilled that request.
While doing so, we noticed that the workflow for the reporting of
market saturation of their advertising was being handled very
inefficiently and recommended a workflow review for that
particular person's functions within the company.
REVIEW: The staff member's job duties in the morning involved
logging into a national database, extracting particular
information for various viewer markets, cleaning up the
formatting, distilling that information in a spreadsheet into
numbers that were useful to the firm, generating graphs and other
eye-candy from the data, and finally printing, mailing and
emailing the results to various customers and executives in the
firm. It was taking her between 3.5 and 4 hours to perform these
tasks each day.
RESULT: setting up a fully automated solution removed her
interaction with this task other than stuffing the envelopes and
sealing them for delivery to the US Mail. The process server
acquires the information from the national database, passes it
through a series of actions to clean the data into the right
format, moves the data through a spreadsheet, generating the
results, and then prints the reports, graphs and matching
envelopes for mailing, plus emails out the reports
electronically. It provides these services daily in less than
15 minutes, outputting the results around 6:30am, so when the
staff enters the office, everything is already done.
SAVINGS:
- Labor cost savings - 3.5 hours/day at $12/hr:
$10,920 per year, for 6 years.
- Cost to review and implement: $3,800
Cost for ongoing maintenance over 6 years: $3,000
- Total savings: $58,720.00
OTHER VALUE: process occurs without staff intervention, eliminating
lack of fulfillment because of sick-days, medical emergencies, vacations. No new hardware
required; retasked existing employee's unit to act as process server prior to
user's arrival in the morning.
CUSTOMER: Largo customized products manufacturing and sales
firm.
SCENARIO: We were initially called in to provide an upgrade to
one of the computers in the firm. After discussing the firm's
activities with their IT Manager, we offered to do a workflow
review of one department (other department heads were thought to
be disagreeable).
REVIEW: The advertising department generates printed sales
slicks, promotional advertising and web-based content of the
firm's products. The process starts with a super-high resolution
photo of each item, which was then sent to any one of their graphic
artists (depending on artist's workload) to be manipulated into
various resolutions for the different purposes, as well as being
further manipulated for the web master. The department handled an
average of 15 of these shots each day, with each original
consuming 20 minutes of time being manipulated this way.
RESULT: setting up a series of target folders on the company's
main server which were watched by the process server. Each folder
would induce the process server to perform a different automated process,
placing the resulting file back into the originating user's hard
drive in an output folder, or into a specific person's that it
was to go to.
The processes included color-correction, saving the
file into a variety of different sizes for the different uses,
generating PDF proofs, emailing proofs to major clients and
resellers, faxing proofs, as well as distributing the files to
the appropriate person (the webmaster gets the low-res version,
this layout specialist gets that color-corrected high-res
version, the sales team gets a mid-resolution version to brief
them on up-coming products). The server also creates the web page
template code for the webmaster, reducing his overhead per page.
While our consultant was at it, he also created a
fax-back/fax-on-demand system using the same process server, to
take the firm's existing product slicks and serve them up to
resellers/distributors/clients.
SAVINGS:
- Labor cost savings - 20 minutes x 15 shots =
5 hours/day at $16.50/hr:
$20,625 per year, for 2 years to date.
- Cost to review and implement: $4,320
Cost for ongoing maintenance over 2 years: $1,350
- Total savings: $35,580.00
OTHER VALUE: freed graphic artists to produce instead of manipulate; creation of a fax-back/fax-on-demand system; reduced time requirements for the webmaster.
