Friday 29 February 2008

Where Have You Been All My Life?

Sometimes my job can be so gratifying. One of the accounting staff came into my temporary office today saying those immortal words, "Where have you been all my life? I have just entered a stack of wire transfers. In our old system that would have taken me all afternoon."

As part of the training for the new system, we had come up with a way for the wire transfers to be entered in one transaction which created an invoice and payment in Accounts Payable as well as updating the General Ledger and Bank Reconciliation file using Microsoft Great Plains' Quick Cheques. The solution will also work in any currency and the staff member can even override the exchange rate on the fly.

But the important part isn't the "gee whiz" of new technology, it's that this staff member now has an afternoon available for higher value activities because she no longer has to do all the mechanical tasks associated with the old system. Makes you think how much your old system is costing in terms of lost productivity, doesn't it?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another good post. I'm amazed when I find companies where people are doing some dull tedious process manually rather than using a shortcut.

Amazed, but not surprised. And a little saddened that nobody in a 'managerial' role hasn't asked the question "can't we do this a better way?"

Your general theme and line of work - implementations and systems - seems to have gotten some big treatment in the most recent CA magazine - any comments on that article?