Workflow Automation Software

Millennia Group Blog

Fatherly advice. Get back to the office.

Via Flickr - Jacob Botter

I’ve been in the working world for long enough to have some credentials – 38 years to be exact.  If I was advising my children, I would strongly suggest that they get back into the office as many days a week as possible and especially on Friday.  As a father, I believe that is good advice for younger workers.

As a business owner whose company provides a cloud workflow and critical document archive solution, that could be shooting myself in the foot.  The more people who work remotely, the more demand there is for businesses to have great solutions for remote workers to be productive.  But I think my fatherly advice is the correct advice overall and here’s why.

Continue reading “Fatherly advice. Get back to the office.”

Endnote, what’s that?

Created by Millennia Group with Adobe Acrobat Comment Tools

The internet is amazing and it seems will shortly be even more amazing when Bing and Google fully deploy their AI powered search engines.  Finding information quickly is already simple and fast, especially if you have a pretty good idea of what it is you are looking for.  When AI enters the picture, the picture literally could be significantly better.

Simple and fast search is great.  But the degree of trust in the search result is based on the effort you make to get comfortable with the answer.  A few clicks to alternative information maybe or just some level of trust in the source website.  As the level of sophistication and depth of the questions being asked of AI increase, so too will the degree of trust needed in the result.  And hence the need for endnotes.

Continue reading “Endnote, what’s that?”

No Top Ten. Bottom Five.

Via Flickr by Richard Masoner

Everyone does a top ten best or ten most list, especially at the beginning of the year.  Top ten this or top ten that.  But what about the bottom?  What would that look like if we had the bottom five; five lowest played songs of 2022, five business ideas that fizzled by mid-year, five worst investments of 2022. That last one is real.

Can it help us to understand the five worst of something?  Yes, absolutely that can be very helpful if for no other reason than to raise awareness.  So here is a hypothetical list of five worst business operation decisions of 2022:

Continue reading “No Top Ten. Bottom Five.”

This is Critical

Via Flickr by Matt Jiggins

What’s your company’s superpower?  It could be a technology, a marketing edge, engineering talent, or exceptional service.  Whatever your secret sauce is, it’s important in generating your revenue. What could be its kryptonite?  Obviously, whatever could harm or stop your superpower would logically be your kryptonite.

It’s also obvious that you want to prevent kryptonite situations from occurring.  You visit important customers frequently, pay a lot for marketing and engineering talent and invest in your technology and operations.  But somebody always wants to see proof.  You do have the critical documentation, right?

Continue reading “This is Critical”

Go ahead, take two weeks off

Via Flicker - Bernard Dupont

Banks and other financial institutions have a requirement that all officers must take two consecutive weeks off work.  The reason, which is advocated by the FDIC, is so that the institution has a better chance to uncover fraudulent activity.  If the employee is gone for an extended period, strange correspondence and irregular transactions handled by the backup employee could expose the fraud.

However, irregular and strange don’t only relate to fraud.  That type of activity can be related to current business processes.  Our last post was about how costly exceptions to the standard business process seem to go unnoticed because managing the exception becomes routine for that employee.  Therefore, whenever there is employee turnover or extended PTO, plug in a trusted squeaky wheel and take notes.

Continue reading “Go ahead, take two weeks off”

Workplace Bias, the Process Kind

Via Flickr, The Detective by Paurian

We love to dig into our client’s business processes and help them overachieve their stated goals of improved efficiency or compliance.  It’s a mentally challenging and stimulating exercise that we really enjoy.  However, we have learned that part of the challenge is the fact that there’s a real bias to under-divulge information about what the current process consists of. 

This bias is not intentional by any means.  It’s a function of unconscious acceptance of exception management as part of the job.  Put more simply, most employees just handle the issues that come up when there is an exception, and it doesn’t register as a “step” in the process.  However, it is exactly these exceptions that take the most time and therefore cost the most money.  Therefore, eliminating the bias to get to the true process is a great place to start.

Continue reading “Workplace Bias, the Process Kind”

Mission Not Impossible

Via Flickr, Tony Werman and Funtoosh

It’s difficult to claim that you are compliant with internal or external rules and regulations if you don’t have a good base to start with.  Take the concept of the accurate value of your customer contracts for instance or exposure due to vendor contracts, both part of any Sarbanes Oxley regulations (SOX).  It’s hard to imagine having complete confidence in those values or exposures, defined as no more than 5% deviation by SOX, if you don’t have confidence in the collection of supporting documentation.

The focus on customer contracts should take precedence and probably does already in terms of recording the contract terms in your billing system.  But the effort for the most part is still a manual data entry process unless it’s a B2C relationship and all executed digitally online.  Having those contracts to support the revenue is still very likely a messy, disorganized affair with some digital and some paper, some in the cloud and some on the network or attached to the ERP.  An impossible task to corral it all right?

Continue reading “Mission Not Impossible”

Match made in heaven

Via Flickr - Yrjo Jyske - young couple

When two people seem very happy together, it’s “a match made in heaven.”  When something just works exactly as you expect it to, you will hear someone say “bingo” or “the stars aligned.”  More recent versions of this would include “life is good.”  They are all just sayings that express the fact that something went right.

We won’t provide examples of common sayings when things go wrong.  That could be humorous, or it might offend some people.  Your employees should have “life is good” moments daily to the point where its just the way it is.  They should quickly find a document that someone requested at the very end of the day.  They should pull a collection of documents together that support an important compliance report in minutes not hours or days.  How do you get there?

Continue reading “Match made in heaven”

Not so fast with “bring on the auditors”

Steps - by Jordan Schwarts via Flickr

As a follow up to our last post about having a system of record to make audits seem like a walk in the park, there is more to it.  Recall that a system of record document management solution holds the confirmed supporting documentation for your critical company data, such as, transactions, client accounts, vendor contracts, etc.  If your current file storage solution is not working and you want to convert it to a system of record there are a few things that are required. 

Like all good things, it will take some effort on the front end.  But as we stated in the last post, it is well worth it.  And the value is more than just having a better audit experience.  Its worth it because you also have better information at your fingertips and that leads to better decisions.  So what’s required? Be humble because you will likely learn that your organization is not perfect, be diligent and have some fun because you will discover nuggets of gold.  

Continue reading “Not so fast with “bring on the auditors””

Bring on the auditors!

Regulatory and other entities that audit

Does the thought of going through an audit scare you?  What is an audit?  According to The American Heritage Dictionary, an audit is – An examination of records or financial accounts to check their accuracy or confirm adherence to policy or regulation.  And what does an auditor do? Performs verification and substantiation procedures.  And what types of audits are there? Financial, compliance, internal, security and many more.   

Audits are not something that most of us enjoy going through.  Not for nefarious reasons, but mostly because of the extra time demands and that feeling of uncertainty about providing the required information.  Your accounting system or ERP has been designed to collect and keep your transaction information.  However, can your auditor verify and substantiate the transactions or adherence to policies by matching it to your supporting documentation?  If not, you need to take a system of record approach to documentation and you’ll say “bring on the auditors”.

Continue reading “Bring on the auditors!”