A new article published by me on the Campana & Schott Web site.
Microsoft Teams and Business Apps not only digitize work processes. The tools also improve the employee experience in the home office. Companies need to examine how they can promote virtual collaboration.
Are your employees well equipped in terms of processes for resilient and efficient exchange?
Many department heads with budget responsibility know it: They receive invoices by e-mail or mail with a request for approval. And this is often where the inefficient work begins. Postal invoices remain in the mailbox or on the desk – and in the current pandemic, in the deserted office. To approve them, managers must access a central Excel spreadsheet, for example, each time they check the remaining budget. In most cases, these are garnished with the notorious sReferences, pivot tables and VBA macros and are correspondingly inperformant. Valuable time is lost.
With regard to Excel, this is the crux of the matter. After all, Excel is the most frequently used application for business processes in a company. But problems often arise during use: only one file exists, and only one user can open and edit it at a time. Possibility for parallel access? Definitely not recommended! Also, data maintenance, file sizes or sufficient scalability pose increasing challenges in usage. Thus, at the latest in the current situation, a rethinking for processes and business applications must take place. In the long run, these “applications” will become unmaintainable and represent a high risk for critical processes.
Streamline and automate processes
As a first step, companies should question and rethink individual processes: Is this process necessary or perhaps dispensable? Can it be simplified, shortened or even automated? It is always surprising to see how many processes in companies have evolved over time and are still being dragged along today, even though they no longer actually make sense. “We’ve always done it that way” has long ceased to be an argument.
A large, expensive solution is not always necessary to simplify and digitize processes. A wide range of options exist here:
… To learn more about this topic read the full article (in German): Virtuelle Zusammenarbeit braucht effiziente digitale Prozesse