Three departments, three answers

Here are three jobs we've done, in three different departments.

None of them looked alike.

That's the point.

The first was receivables.

Closing out finished jobs.

Final invoices, with every supporting document checked and sent.

They were a few weeks behind, and slipping.

We met once, and looked at the work that was taking so long.

A day later, there was a working draft.

Two days after that first meeting, it was finished.

The time that work took was cut in half, and they caught up.

The second was payables.

Entering invoices took so long it was dragging on everything else.

Now they drop an invoice into a folder, and it files itself.

Matched to a purchase order, with the cost logged as received.

Built for the software they already run.

It took a day.

There's no number on that one, and we won't invent one.

What there is, is this.

It was like magic to them.

And they were so thankful.

The third was receiving.

Nothing can be paid until somebody confirms the goods arrived.

And confirming meant going into the software and checking items in, one line at a time.

Receiving never had time for it.

So invoices sat there, unpayable.

Now receiving does the part they were always good at.

They check the delivery, mark up the packing slip by hand, and scan it.

From there, the slip is read, each item is checked against the order, and it's marked received.

Nobody opens the software at all.

And payables can see, straight away, that the invoice is good to pay.

The problem was in one department.

The payoff showed up in another.

Three departments.

Three completely different answers.

If we'd turned up with a product, we couldn't have built any of them.

That's why, when you ask what we'll do for you, the honest answer is, we don't know yet.

Not until we've looked.