Buck the trend through Information Technology

By Phillip Quay

In the present economic climate every Waikato business large or small has to produce more by using less. For the large corporates, investing in large scale automation to get more labour productivity is a common strategy. However, as most businesses in the Waikato are small to medium enterprises this approach may be beyond their means.

Alan Chew, managing director of Houston Technology Group in Hamilton has been helping SME’s in the region with labour productivity ideas for over two decades. He says that for the small and medium enterprise, not only can information technology help them beat the challenges of 2009, it costs very little to implement. “This is because almost all businesses have already invested in good IT systems. What they need are the ideas to leverage the tools that they already own.”

As an example, Alan Chew cites MS SharePoint. The latest MS SharePoint is Microsoft’s largest investment in any one software platform since Windows, a platform designed to provide the information processing tools to collaborate, store, search, process and present information needed to run today’s business. Alan Chew’s own company leverages this technology today to allow staff to obtain online real-time leave approvals. SharePoint has replaced the old Excel spreadsheet system that involved hard copy forms and manual signatures. Today the approval process involves completing an online form which triggers a request for approval from the staff’s manager and notification to the payroll administrator at the same time. When the approval is granted (electronically by the manager) the system automatically notifies the employee and the staff holiday calendar is automatically updated on the intranet for all to see.

Microsoft has poured in an enormous amount of money to develop a piece of software that is designed to give users a huge lift in productivity. “And over 90% of network owners out there already own the software because it comes bundled with MS Small Business Server and Windows Server.” All the user needs to do is to get some advice on how to implement and use it. “Places that have implemented SharePoint have reported impressive productivity gains,” says Alan Chew.

There are many technologies that cost next to nothing but produce massive productivity gains. One technology that Alan Chew is very passionate about is document search. With the advent of the near-paperless office more and more information is produced electronically. Whereas previous to the arrival of word processors and email, a standard sales proposal may take a week to write and a day or two to arrive at the client’s desk, today these documents are produced and transmitted at the speed of thought. Because of the ease and speed of generating these documents, large volumes of them get produced. Alan Chew says that it is not abnormal for clients to send out three versions of a 40-page proposal to a customer in the space of two days.

The challenge it then poses is how do you retrieve this information from this legion of Word, Excel, picture, video and pdf files as well as the hundreds of emails you receive and send each day?

Because of this explosion of information it has been worked out that 30% of a normal worker’s time is spent looking for information and another 30% is spent recreating the content. Any technology that can assist with reducing this time expenditure must surely be worth its weight in gold.

“That is where something like MS SharePoint comes into its own because SharePoint has a very sophisticated document search facility,” says Alan Chew. “But wait, there are even cheaper solutions,” continues Alan Chew, “some of my clients use free software such as Copernic to great effect.” Alan Chew insists that he does not always promote the use of free software and that is not because it is free. “It is the lack of support from the writers and the high risk of incompatibility with other parts of the system that makes me cautious,” he adds. “However, there are many free packages out there that are highly reliable and productive.”

As a fully qualified chartered accountant who runs an IT business, Alan Chew looks at IT in a very different light from most other IT providers. He focuses on the bottom line as against the technology. In the current climate many businesses are taking the opportunity to look at ways to better utilise their IT so that they can enhance productivity and increase their bottom line. This is exactly what he sets out to do – help clients gain productivity through better use of their existing IT infrastructure.

Alan Chew names two particular technologies that SME businesses should look out for in 2009:

MS SharePoint

Most businesses already own this software. It allows you to store, retrieve and share information easily among all your staff. SharePoint stops the problem of staff randomly storing files and making it difficult for others to retrieve them later. It also comes with a facility that allows you to automate tasks like staff applying for and managers approving of holidays, etc. If businesses can reduce the 30% of their time that staff spend on searching for information and the 30% on recreating content, then there are huge gains to be made.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

With demand falling, organisations are realising the need for effective customer relationship management to encourage new business and increase customer retention levels. CRM software allows firms to become more customer focussed. At its most basic level, it allows you to store all your communications (emails you have sent, phone calls you have made, quotations you have done, notes on meetings you have attended) with and information (contact details, names of contacts, birthdates, size of business, etc) about any client in one central place. Thus if you are out of the office and a client rings in, any member of your staff can access the same information and conduct the business. But CRM is much wider than that. It leads to more new business and higher retention of customers.

In a recession, leads become harder to come by and must be handled with greater care. CRM allows the sales team to manage the sales process a lot more efficiently and professionally. The net result is greater revenue.

Besides considering these two very innovative technologies all businesses should also evaluate other parts of their business to see where IT can help. “Try and identify what processes are consuming a lot of labour and develop shortcuts for them,” Alan Chew advises. “For instance, if you do a lot of client correspondence, consider introducing macros to shorten the task. For example, it is easy to write a macro in MS Word that allows you to automatically import the contact details of the clients from your client database into the letter. Better still, create a single step macro that opens up your blank letterhead and inserts the current date and client contact details.”

Or learn to use Excel better and link it to your accounting database to automate your quotations. Use Excel to tap into your accounting program to mine the data and present you with useful information.

Use MS Outlook to manage the scheduling of your staff or other resources (such as company cars, the boardroom, etc).

The skills needed to do these things are not very high and with a little training most people can achieve these productivity gains themselves. Most business people already own and are competent users of programs like Word, Excel and Outlook and all they need is a little bit of guidance on how to achieve the results.

One last technology that Alan Chew wanted to cover was the new generation of dictation automation software and hardware.

We talk five times faster than we write so for professionals needing to fit in more appointments and bill more hours, rather than spending time in the office typing or writing, Dictation Automation is an ideal technology. He advises anybody who produces reports and writes letters (doctors, lawyers, accountants, valuers, vets, social workers, etc) to consider shortening their production cycle by adopting technologies like dictation automation, speech recognition or handwriting recognition. At the least, learn to use your MS Word better and use the macro and autocorrect functions to dramatically shorten the process.

Houston Technology Group delivers free workshops and seminars to bring new and practical technology ideas to the attention of its clients. For the first seminar of the 2009 HTG IT Productivity Series of Seminars the company has partnered with an Auckland firm with 45 years experience in voice and data solutions to update Waikato businesses on the progress in dictation automation technology. The workshop to be held on 25 February at 3.00pm at HTG is free to the public but registration is necessary. To find out more please email info@htg.co.nz

Alan Chew points out that having assisted Waikato businesses in the last 23 years with lots and lots of technology ideas, he is full of existing and new ideas that he can easily share with all businesses. “There is always some element of inventing the wheel in the IT industry because most things in IT are new,” proffers Alan Chew, “but after having done it for 23 years, we now have a very huge array of ready-made, field tested ideas that we can roll out cheaply and quickly.”

HTG clients agree with Alan Chew’s strategy. Kawerau District Council’s Finance Manager, Gilmour Jamieson came across Alan Chew in early 2006 and contracted HTG to assist with its IT support that year. HTG quickly went to work and introduced a raft of IT ideas and strategies. Within a year the council was able to reduce its support costs by nearly a quarter and staff productivity had improved. At the end of last year HTG introduced more new technologies and dropped the cost by another 17%. Last month the council doubled its contract with HTG and outsourced even more of its IT to the company. “Why wouldn’t you if a firm like HTG comes in and shows you all these new technology ideas that work and give you quick monetary as well as intangible gains?” muses Gilmour Jamieson. “Kawerau District Council had invested heavily in its IT in the past and had been sitting on this potential for productivity gain for a long time. All we needed was for a firm like HTG to come in and point us in the right direction.”

Alan Chew is the managing director of Houston Technology Group (alan@htg.co.nz). A free seminar on Dictation Automation is being held on 25 March 2009 at 3.00pm at HTG’s training room. To get more details or to book please email info@htg.co.nz

Published 20th February 2009