How Many Times Is Your Team Entering the Same Information?

Here's a simple operations exercise.

Choose one piece of information your company uses frequently.

Maybe it's:

A customer name.

A job number.

A project address.

A purchase order.

An estimate.

A service request.

Now follow that information through your company.

How many times does someone type it?

You might be surprised.

The Same Information, Over and Over

A customer sends information by email.

An employee enters it into a spreadsheet.

Someone creates a project in the project management system.

Another employee enters the information into accounting.

The field team needs the same details.

Then someone manually adds part of it to a report.

Nobody thinks much about any individual step because each one might only take a few minutes.

But multiply those minutes across hundreds or thousands of transactions.

That's a lot of administrative work. And every manual entry creates another opportunity for an error.

Enter Once. Use Many Times.

A better operational question is:

Where should this information originate?

Once that's established, ask:

Where else does it need to go?

Now you can start designing the workflow around the information instead of around individual

software platforms.

Maybe information entered into your CRM should create a project.

Maybe an email should populate a database.

Maybe selecting a job number inside a field application should automatically populate the

customer, site, location and other job information.

Maybe completed field information should automatically feed a management report.

The employee shouldn't have to know where every piece of information needs to go.

The system should.

Your Existing Tools May Be Fine

This is also where companies sometimes make an expensive mistake.

They assume they need to replace everything.

Not necessarily.

Suppose your company has an Excel estimating workbook that works extremely well.

Your estimators know it.

The calculations work.

The estimates are accurate.

There's no reason to replace it just because you've implemented a project management

platform.

The better question could be:

How do we connect the estimating process to everything happening before and after it? Your project management system can manage the opportunity.

Excel can perform the estimate.

The important estimating information can then feed back into the larger workflow.

Now each tool is doing what it does best.

That's operations design.

Look for Duplicate Entry

Ask your team this week:

“What information do you have to enter in more than one place?”

Don't be surprised if you get answers immediately.

Those answers give you a roadmap.

Not every duplicate entry needs automation.

But every duplicate entry deserves the question:

Why?

Connect the Process

Pack Consulting Group helps businesses examine the gaps between their systems—not just the

systems themselves.

Often, the problem isn't that a company lacks technology.

It's that the tools, people and processes aren't connected.

Before replacing software that works, look at the workflow surrounding it.

You may not need a new system.

You may just need your existing systems to work together.