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Millennia Group Blog

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…

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:

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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?

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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

How old are you?

Explore

Try to remember the days of all files being on a shared network drive or all data in spreadsheets.  Try to remember creating and sharing the responsibility of managing a spreadsheet.  What was the largest group of cohorts that you worked with to create a spreadsheet?  Is that easier now than before?  If you need to go back and find the final version of that file, is it easy to do?  Is it easy to share internally and externally?  Do you even need to create spreadsheets anymore?

Is your world any better now that you have implemented that all-encompassing, do all solution be it ERP, contract management, collaboration, or document management solution?  Is it easier to create, collaborate on, find and share information?  Is there better…