WHERE DOES YOUR TEAM LOSE TIME WITHOUT REALIZING IT?

Where Does Your Team Lose Time Without Realizing It?

Big problems are easy to notice. A missed deadline, an incorrect order, or a major reporting issue usually gets attention quickly.

The smaller delays are harder to see.

An employee spends a few minutes looking for the latest order status. Someone in accounting waits for information from another department. A manager double-checks a number before making a decision. A customer calls with a question, and the answer requires checking several different places.

Individually, these moments may not seem significant. When they happen repeatedly across a business, they can take up a surprising amount of time.

The Work Around the Work

Not every time-consuming task appears on a process map.

Consider how often employees have to stop what they are doing to:

• Find information they need to continue
• Ask another employee for an update
• Confirm that information is current
• Check the same information in multiple places
• Wait for someone else before taking the next step

The actual task may only take a few minutes. Getting everything needed to complete it can take much longer.

That is where businesses can start to find opportunities for improvement.

How Many Places Hold the Answer?

Think about a relatively simple question from a customer:

“When will my order ship?”

How quickly can someone answer it?

If the employee has to check the sales order, contact the warehouse, look for an email, or ask someone whether inventory has been allocated, the problem isn’t necessarily the order itself. The information needed to answer the question may simply be too difficult to access.

The same issue can appear throughout a business.

Finance may be waiting for operational information before completing a report. Purchasing may need to confirm inventory before placing an order. Management may need someone to compile information before understanding how the business is performing.

The more places employees have to look, the more time gets spent finding answers instead of using them.

Waiting Counts Too

Lost time isn’t always active work.

Sometimes it is the gap between one person finishing a task and another person realizing it is ready for them.

An approval sits unnoticed. A warehouse employee waits for clarification. Purchasing doesn’t know that demand has changed. A manager is waiting for a report that depends on information from several departments.

These delays can be especially difficult to recognize because everyone involved may be busy. The process is moving, just more slowly than it needs to.

Repeated Questions Can Tell You Something

One useful way to identify these issues is to pay attention to the questions employees ask repeatedly.

“Has this been approved?”

“Do we have enough inventory?”

“Did this order ship?”

“Which number is correct?”

“Has the customer paid?”

When the same questions come up every day, the problem may not be communication. It may be that employees don’t have an easy way to find the information themselves.

Those questions can point directly to areas where better visibility or a more connected process could save time.

One Source of Information Makes a Difference

This is one area where an ERP system can play an important role.

Platforms such as Acumatica and Sage 100 are designed to bring key business information and processes together rather than leaving departments to operate from completely separate sets of information.

When sales, inventory, purchasing, accounting, and other areas of the business are connected, employees can spend less time tracking down updates or determining which information is current.

That doesn’t mean every question disappears. It means more of the information needed to answer those questions is available where the work is already happening.

Start by Looking for Friction

You don’t need to review every process in the company at once.

Instead, pay attention to the small moments that interrupt work during an ordinary day.

Where are employees waiting? What information are they constantly asking for? Which answers require checking several places? Where does someone have to stop working because they need an update from somebody else?

Those moments can reveal opportunities that are easy to miss when you’re only looking for major problems.

Saving five minutes once doesn’t change much. Saving five minutes on something your team does dozens of times every week is a different story.

Finding the Answer Shouldn’t Be the Work

Technology should make important business information easier to access and use. When employees can find what they need without tracking down another person or searching across multiple places, they have more time to focus on the work that actually requires their attention.

ACC Software Solutions helps businesses evaluate their current processes and determine whether Acumatica, Sage 100, or improvements to their existing ERP environment could make everyday work easier. If you’re spending too much time simply trying to find the right information, we’d be happy to start a conversation.

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