The spirit of Digitalization lies in the use of technology to increase productivity and efficiency while reducing costs. It improves an existing business process or processes by converting them from a human-driven event or series of events to software-driven. Read more about the difference between Digitization, Digitalization, and Digital Transformation.
Hence, Digitalization reduces human errors, enhances output quality, decreases costs due to COPQ, creates consistency in output, and increases customer satisfaction and retention. The list of benefits reaped goes on and on. All these benefits end up in the ultimate goal of any organization, viz., making money.
The good news about Digitalization is that it could be quite easy and cost-efficient that it would take someone a couple minutes thinking out of the box to leverage the technology in their hands. It does not necessarily need to be deployed with state-of-the-art technology or machines. On the contrary, most of office work can be digitalized by leveraging applications already sitting in each personal computer.
Our Digitalization Tools
Microsoft Office applications, Excel and Access, are prominent tools to digitalize office work. With the breadth of features and functionalities available in these applications that come with default installation, they render themselves as unrivalled go-to apps for quick, easy, and cost-efficient digitalization vehicles. MS Access with its power of hosting relational databases coupled with the ability to create fancy user interfaces could cost an organization nearly nothing to build a workflow system compared to expensive, off-the-shelf applications, for instance. When connected to MS Excel with its gorgeous features of Power Query, PowerPivot, Cube Formulas, and VBA, one can create highly customized reports that refresh instant information in a button click.
We at Excellence Made Easy help you achieve just that! Cost-efficient and customized digitalization using tools already available in your machines. Take a few minutes thinking about manual or cumbersome processes you or your employees are performing daily. If I were you, I would hold a brainstorming session with key people in my office and prepare a list of tasks that take most of your workers’ time. Try to analyze the steps they do in each process along with the output required. We can help you analyze your processes and propose the most feasible solutions for digitalization.
To help you achieve this, use the scenarios below that may resonate with one or more problems you are facing:
Scenario 1: Financial Reporting
You oversee financial reporting in your organization. You or one of your team members spend hours, even days, collecting and cleaning raw data from Trial Balances and other sources. The process of cleaning the data and storing it is cumbersome that Excel itself can hardly manage it. Even after cleaning your data, you still need to produce Profit & Loss (P&L) reports in various shapes and dimensions. For instance, Per Region, Per Country, P&L Detailed, Summaries, etc. Moreover, your reports recipients require reports to be in very customized formats and layouts that require you to spend hours aggregating data and just copy-and-paste numbers in specific cells. To add insult to injury, you need to replicate the same report several times but in different parameters or criteria. For example, the VP of North America Region should not see the report pertaining to Europe Region!
What an awkward process you run monthly that might take up one third of a month worth of your valuable time during Reporting Periods!
Solution:
What if you have a tool that allows you to collect and clean data, then to produce your customized reports in just a few button clicks within less than an hour, or seconds? That is magic, isn’t it?
We can provide you with a tool to do just that using technology already available at your hands. That is, you don’t need to buy, install, or subscribe to any new software.
If this scenario or a variation of it applies to you, reach out to us for more details.
Scenario 2: Verification of eCommerce Delivery Invoices
You run eCommerce business and deliver your customers’ shipments using different couriers with whom you have delivery agreements in various rate structures. Regularly, you receive couriers’ invoices in multiple formats and structures; spreadsheets, text files, xml files, or others.
To verify your cost, your team has a tough time cross-checking the invoices with the agreed rates. Electronic invoices received need to be cleaned, re-formatted, and prepared to cross-check with the rates that reside in random folders or in email inboxes. Despite the arduous work by your team, accuracy is low due to human errors keying in figures and looking them up from one spreadsheet to another.
Unfortunately, most times, whether you know it or not, you are overcharged by courier companies and find yourself not competitive enough to retain your customers who deflect to other eCommerce providers. The irony is that you come to know this information late as the profitability reports reach you only after the costing process has been concluded. Obviously, reports are late due to the lengthy, manual cost checking process performed by your team.
Solution:
At Excellence Made Easy we can work with you to build a customized tool that runs the entire process all at once automatically. Starting with importing and reformatting your courier invoices, to storing them in a structured database, to building your couriers’ rate sheets, then to cross-checking the invoices and producing variance reports up until creating pushed reports on cost by item by courier agent.
If this scenario or a variation of it applies to you, reach out to us for more details.
Do you have other scenarios eligible for digitalization? Provide us with your feedback in the comment box or reach out to us to share your scenarios.