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Reinventing Processes Made Easy

When setting up the requirements for the new and enhanced way of doing your businesses processes, it is important to ensure that all activities are accounted for and that all alignments will be addressed with corresponding action plans.

Once you’ve decided which functional areas of your business you will integrate into an enterprise resource planning system, you should proceed to detail your current operational procedures. Put it into writing so that you will capture the full scope of the technological changes you’re planning for the business.

Keeping What We Do Now – Just Bigger and Better

Whether you’re simply installing improvements to your business structure or going all out and reinventing the wheel, a variety of tools will be necessary. In addition, before launching a full-scale change management, you should consider two things: your business’s culture and your current operational processes.

A visual process flow is the visual representation of a complex task or process – with a series of illustrations, one can see how the task/process is broken down step by step. Visual process flows make it easier for people to describe to others or to visualize for themselves how the task/process is done.

Your company offers a niche service to the oil and gas industry, and as you grow, you’re noticing more and more delays – on your end – when it comes to booking business.

You’ve added more staff to make service calls in the field, but the work is reaching to locales farther and farther from your home office. Consequently, you find that you personally are handling most of their calls, since you need to see a copy of the client’s contract, or because you know where to find that last change order.

Contractors operating in multiple counties and/or jurisdictions in Alberta encounter more requirements for doing business than their counterparts working in only one county/jurisdiction. This is especially true when it comes to figuring payroll taxes.

Heavy construction occurring in the Alberta oil and gas fields can be characterized as challenging, given the sometimes harsh conditions and demands on both equipment and workers. Consequently, the trials of heavy construction project management are many.

As we’ve said, companies relying on spreadsheets, documents, or email threads to track things like equipment rentals, purchase orders, inventory shipments, and invoices are dealing with inaccurate, incomplete, and/or duplicated information. This is the cause of many problems, including loss of profits as a project gets stuck in downtime waiting for a part they didn’t know was out of stock.

It’s a common problem for engineers and project managers: the search for the right equipment to match a customer’s needs. Almost no problem is as challenging for energy professionals as engineering the right indoor climate system to provide maximum efficiency and energy savings. To make it even more challenging, the engineers/project managers must ensure that the HVAC specifications received match the proposed system size and output, among other things that must be matched.

As such, RFI tracking for HVAC companies is a crucial part of keeping vendors and manufacturers competitive. Without RFI tracking, most businesses would fall back on legacy methods like written data or spreadsheets, which can mean perpetuating a system of inaccurate and isolated information.

Many factors can be attributed to the rise of the oil equipment rental market, including the rising expense of unconventional practices like shale and simply not throwing capital to buy equipment, maintain it, and keep a parts inventory up and running.

Do you remember when filing cabinets were a staple in the office? And then, even when technology started taking off, maybe you weren’t quite adverse to the idea of using technology, but still – certain types of critical information, like client contracts, lead developments, and all that project documentation just seemed safer physically within arm’s reach.

Now that you’ve expanded your business, however, there are several issues you might be having. One being that with so much new business, you and your staff are spending all of your time thumbing through what seems like a million client folders to find the right document. Another being that maybe you’ve expanded so much that you have more than one location and/or the need to work both on location and out of the office. In that situation, you don’t even have access to client or contract information because your filing cabinet isn’t anywhere near you.

When your business grows, it grows everywhere – including in sales tax requirements. When this happens, you appear to have only two choices: to sink time and energy into sales tax management, which doesn’t make you money, or carry the risk of being non-compliant, which could cost you money.

Or is there a better way?