How a Simple Question Saved 212 Hours a Year.
Let me set the stage for you. I was working onsite at a client of mine, a trucking company. The operations manager, my point of contact, was busy trying to reply to emails from customers. I needed his help on my project but for the moment he was incommunicado. So I sat back down at my spot and patiently waited my turn for his attention.
30 minutes later he came over to me – exasperated and thoroughly frustrated. “Another day in paradise huh?”, I said. “Yeah, sorry about that. I just keep getting these emails that I need to reply to with load information and it just takes forever”, he said, throwing his hands up in the air.
He continued on. “You need to jump around programs and then I need to put it all in a spreadsheet to email back to the client.” Spent. He let out a sigh and said, “I have a ton of better things to be doing with my time.” For a moment he says nothing. He then looks at me and asks this one simple question. “Is there some way you could program something to do this work for me?”
With that simple question, the ball started rolling. We sat down and walked through what he was doing, identifying that large parts of it could be automated. While we couldn’t completely take the human out of the process, we did simplify things greatly.
Where once the operations manager had to devote a couple of hours to this task, now it only required minutes a day. The manager was now free to focus on other – more profitable – tasks, like sales and customer service.
I know that in every business there is some process that could be automated and which can free you and your staff from unprofitable and unproductive work. Like the trucking company, software automation could free up significant amounts of time for more profitable work. Imagine what you could do with the time saved – office party anyone?
In the end, the software we wrote saved them 212 hours a year. That is over five weeks of time saved for one employee! All from a simple question that asked if there is a better way! So, if that is a question you want answered, then give me a call or email me. You may be surprised at what our answers save you!