Business Transparency is simply the strategic collection and reporting of business information on a periodic basis in order to provide real-time metrics to employees, managers, owners, customers, and vendors. Many solution providers today include Business Process Management (BPM) Tools (Dashboards, etc) that can attach to their applications. There are third party vendors, who also provide BPM tools that can bridge multiple applications. While all these applications can be used to build a business transparency strategy, they can't insure the accuracy of the data.
So let's use Story Construction again (name is changed to protect the innocent) to define this strategy. Story has been in business for over 35 years and has seen growth in almost every year due to the expansion into other counties/states and diversity of product offering (office cleaning and floor maintenance). The owners wanted to be able to back away from the business and allow the managers to handle the daily management duties, but wanted to maintain oversight on daily basis. They were currently using several systems to automate their processes to achieve this goal.
In my evaluation of their business processes it became evident that while they achieved some successes along the way, their business transparency strategy was incomplete, or cumbersome. To find out the answers to questions about the business, it often took several attempts, looking into several applications to achieve that goal. Also, there was no strategic plan to collect data on a periodic schedule to insure that all the cost and revenue numbers were being updated and reported accurately.
My recommendations to Story to solve their issues were:
Daily Work Ticket Management
Utilizing Omnidek, we will create a daily work ticket that will be automatically generated and routed to the managers for every daily project. The Managers will add any additional information about the job, or re-assign the project to a different crew. At the end of the job, the crew foreman will complete the OC check list within the form, document any issues, and take pictures when necessary. The work ticket will route back to the manager for review and completion and once completed, the WT will be stored in Omnidek for limited control access to the information by the customers, managers, and owners. Special project WT's will be routed to accounting for billing.
This new workflow will offer business transparency in several ways.
Managers and Owners will be able to review and comment on tickets for work that needs to be done that day.
Customers will be able to review the work ticket history if they have any questions about the cleaning visit
We have embedded a quality control punch list to each form
Document the work performed
Provide business metrics on information collected
Provided a competitive advantage when soliciting new business.
Provided an unbilled status report for special project work
Equipment Management
We will create an Omnidek workflow for managing equipment repairs and inspections to create a transparent business strategy. We will create a service repair form that when selected, a PIP (Problem Isolation Procedure) would be presented to the cleaners to make sure the they tried all potential "quick" solutions before submitting the request. The SR will then route to their manager who will see if there is anything more that can be tried before sending to the repair shop. Once all actions have been exhausted, the repair shop will use Omnidek reporting to dispatch either a new piece of equipment to the site, or send out a repair tech. Repairs will then be documented on the SR for historical purposes, parts used will adjust the parts inventory, and all notifications and status reports will reflect the real time status of the equipment.
This new workflow will offer business transparency in several ways.
Managers and Owners will be able to review and comment on tickets for work that needs to be done
Document the work performed
Provide business analysis metrics on information collected
Equipment status is transparent to all parties that need to collaborate or report on the information
Equipment parts inventories are transparent and maintained
Equipment metrics to evaluate equipment performance vs. cost
Inspection Operations
Story has several areas that inspections need to happen to insure quality control and maintenance of equipment. We created an Omnidek work process that will automatically cast an inspection form to the inspector when scheduled. Each form will have specific inspection questions based on job, location, equipment, etc. Once the form is complete, we will create a work process to document and notify all parties responsible for correcting any problems related to the inspected items. Using Omnidek's Portal and Collaborative Chat, each inspection form can be discussed and resolved.
This new workflow will offer business transparency in several ways.
Managers and Owners will be able to review and comment on Inspection Forms
Document the work performed
Provide business analysis metrics on information collected
Provides a transparent schedule for everything that needs to be inspected
Historical Reporting is built as each inspection is being performed
Management and ownership will be able to quickly review inspection status information real time.
In conclusion, Omnidek has so much flexibility that we were able to meet, discuss and develop work processes that will accomplish the business transparency goals we sought after. The "no code/low code" design of the Omnidek platform will prove to be very cost effective in the development of these work processes.
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