The Attivo Blog

A lot of businesses can get away with throwing people at a problem.  Adding personnel is very costly – on the way up, and on the way down.  Good systems are much less expensive. More compliance requirements? There's nothing like a well designed system that is the ONLY way a job can be done to enforce compliance.  Compliance requirements come apart when they depend on a person to remember to write something down.  Systems define the process, become the only way they can be done (thus assuring it will be done that way), and are self-documenting (for audit).  It is the cheapest insurance you can buy. Stop talking about it and implement bar code data collection already. In my many years of technology implementation, the one thing that I have heard people talk about the most but do the least, is bar coding data collection systems.  It is probably the highest return on investment project available, but one that requires a little more investment because of the cost of scanners.  As a result, most businesses get cold feet before writing the check.  What a shame…it’s like found money!  And talk about improvements in customer service…don’t get me started! Let technology projects help you get process improvement changes made. “We’ve got to do it for our new system” will usually trump “this is the way we’ve always done it.”   Don’t underestimate the human aspect of change – the people aspect of process improvement and additional automation is far greater than the actual technology challenges.  Use your systems project as the watershed event that is requiring the behavioral changes – changes that are designed to improve everyone’s work life. Learn to manage by exception. Once things are fairly automated, utilize system tools like event management software that alert you of conditions that need management attention in a timely manner.  What goes “bump” in the night for you?  Find that condition when it first happens, and notify the right people to deal with it immediately, before it becomes a costly affair.  These same tools can also be used to automate some very routine tasks, such as emailing order acknowledgements, saving labor cost.  Integrate your systems.  Don’t let your company slip into “Excel Hell”.  Excel is not designed to be a business system…it is an analysis tool.  Find where the disconnects are in your business systems, evidenced by duplicate data in different systems, and extensive use of Excel to operate the business.  Everywhere there is duplicate data indicates waste, and a cost that can be eliminated.  If you need multiple systems to run your business, there is very affordable software available that allows integration of disparate systems to keep each of them updated with data changes made in whichever system "owns" the information (such as customers).

The Fed told us that the recession is over – What do you do to prepare for the recovery? Chances are you’ll need to create a “new normal” for your business.  If you don’t make adjustments on the way up, the risk is that during the next downturn (there will most likely be one; after all), things will be as painful as they were this time.  Here's my top 5 recommendations: 1)  Assess and improve your processes Look around.  See that crack in the ceiling?  Of course you don’t – you’ve ignored it for the last 6 years, why would you see it now?   A good business process review is in order – a “full 360” examination of how well each process is working will reveal lots of opportunities to streamline your business and cut costs – while positioning for growth.  You want to be able to handle a lot more business without a significant increase in personnel.  Contact me for a free worksheet tool to help you get this done. 2 )  Improve your customer service! Price is interesting, but today customer service is king.  If you can’t deliver on time with high quality products and services, somebody else will.  Invest in customer service improvements.  Delight your customers, not just satisfy them.  Survey them (with tools like Survey Monkey) to make sure they’re delighted. 3)  Shorten your lead times Like customer service, someone else will deliver sooner if you can’t.  Look at all elements of lead times – they’re not all on the shop floor, by the way.  A tremendous amount of lead time improvement can be achieve in the front office, in areas such as quoting, planning, etc.  Lead time reduction is a critical part of becoming a lean organization…so get lean already! 4)  Tighten your controls.  If you have inventory, what is your inventory accuracy level?  No, really, what is it? If you’re going to rely on systems (as you should), one of the key metrics in your operations is inventory accuracy.  It’s at the core of all the assumptions that systems use in their logic.  I’ve heard many a business owner tell me that “we have an inventory problem”, to which I always answer “your inventory system is probably just fine, it’s you’re everything else’ that isn’t working”.  Inventory accuracy is very telling about how well your processes are defined and controlled within the system, and is the best report card for operations to measure their controls.  So, how are you measuring inventory accuracy?  Gut feel?  I wouldn’t buy your company. 5)  Invest in Ecommerce  Still depending on that tired looking electronic brochure of a website that your nephew did for you back in ’99?  Well, welcome to the 21^stcentury.  Your customers and suppliers expect more (see #2 above).  Figure out how to collaborate via the web with your customers and suppliers – it will keep your costs low and your customer service high.  Don’t underestimate the importance of ecommerce, regardless of whether you pride yourself on the “personal touch”.  Consider that generation Y or Z customers communicate differently, and perhaps don’t think they need to speak with you.  What about your South Korean manufacturer?  Staying up until 2:00 AM is not exactly what anyone would call a productive way to spend your time.

I've been an avid Anaheim Angels fan (I'll never call them Los Angeles) since my first game in 1984.  These days with my team in the hunt for another American League Championship; I'm sick and tired of reading all the sports "experts" writing off the Angels vs. the Red Sox. Overall Record: Angels. Runs scored: Angels. Head-to-Head: Angels.  How can the experts pick the Red Sox? In their reasoning, it always comes down to one thing, the intangibles. In the IT world, there are literally hundreds of categories of processes you may wish to document. Passwords, Network Architecture, Installed Software and their Update Histories, Backup Schedules; the list goes on and on.  Here at Attivo we considered doing what so many have done - to create a shared database containing all of this information in one place.  From that database, we have one document for each of the above categories, then refer to that document easily when we needed to. We track our own information this way, but more importantly, we keep track of this data for our clients as well. Exact Synergy ,our CRM system,  has the capability to simplify the approach by allowing us to attach this data and documents to the customers. So why did we choose to go with a "workflow" approach instead of documents? Answer: the intangibles. Before I get started, let me explain what a workflow is.  Also called a "process flow" or "request", a workflow is a pre-defined business process that carries information from one employee or resource to another, for the benefit of the required process, until the information is no longer needed. This is best exemplified by a customer comment or complaint. The comment first gets "created" by the satisfied (or angry) customer, then travels with the remarks themselves to the customer's account manager, then on to the general manager - notifying everyone along the way.  As it gets passed along, various people log their own information into the workflow, such as the date of the comment, what product or service the comment concerns, what type of comment it was, to the final resolution of the problem.  A document, on the other hand, is alot like this blog: alot of information on a white sheet of digital paper. I can sort it by category, date, and author...but that's about it.  And that's where the intangibles comes in. Suppose you're a technical support operation and you'd like to see a list of all your customers' installed software sorted by install date. But you'd also like to filter it by Operating System and sort it by the softwares' last updated date. Finally, you'd like to export that data including the updater's comments into an excel spreadsheet.  If this were an online document, you could handle the first and last parts, but all the additional fields and filters in the middle would have required customizations to the document management system that may never be completed. But with Synergy's workflow solution we have at our disposal an almost unlimited number of free fields that are searchable straight out of the box, and the requests themselves carry just as much textual data as a document.