Pruning Paper From Your Business Processes

How to unearth more time and resources for growth

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For service businesses like landscaping, lawn care and irrigation, seasonality and weather conditions emphasize the truth in the old saying, “Make hay while the sun shines.” Labor shortages, supply chain delays and rising inflation have companies revisiting their processes looking for ways to reduce errors and increase efficiency. A great place to start is with the paper getting passed around from one employee or department to the next.

Our world will likely never be entirely “paperless.” Paper is a quick and easy way to jot down notes for yourself or someone else .In the early stages of your business, providing paper estimates and invoices was a relatively inexpensive way to document transactions with your customers and vendors. As your business has grown, however, paper has probably caused one or more of the following problems:

1.      Delays in receiving payment for completed work because of bottlenecks in sending out invoices.

2.      Lost work or lost customers because of errors in scheduling, work orders or estimates.

3.      Rework or multiple visits to project sites due to not having the correct materials or parts for the job.

4.      Lost time searching for missing documents or information.

To put some measurements to those common business problems, Data pro/Gartner Group research found the average employee spends 400hours per year searching for paper documents. And research by PricewaterhouseCoopers found, “The average company spends $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document. Meanwhile, companies lose one out of every 20documents, and spend 25 hours recreating each lost document.”

Digital solutions for all of these problems exist in today’s software market. Comparing features and costs to select the right solution, however, can be overwhelming and a further drain on your limited time. You may have even selected one or more software or cloud-based products for specific functions like scheduling, only to face additional challenges and research as you tried to integrate that solution with another.

Whether your company is completely paper-driven or using a handful of disconnected technology tools, start your efficiency quest by mapping your current business processes from the earliest stages of customer contact. How do you gather customer contact information? Where do you store it? Do you have a process to check for duplications? Are you consistent in how data is entered in spreadsheets or databases? How is that data used later, for example, scheduling work, billing or marketing?

As you map current processes, watch for how the dataflows from one step to the next. Where does data have to be rekeyed or transferred from one process to another? Where are errors happening? Where does rework occur most often? As you identify mistakes and inefficiencies, apply measurements of time or money so you can evaluate the cost of the current situation compared to your investment in technology.

Next, think about your ideal workflows. Don’t worry at this stage about what different solutions might do or not do. Focus instead on the ideal state. For example, what if customers entered their own information instead of an employee taking it over the phone and keying it into a list or database? What if you had work templates that, with accurate measurements, could predict the tools, materials and labor skills needed to complete the job? What if you had an easy way to rearrange work teams when an employee called in sick?

Those “what if” scenarios become your map for your future workflows as well as your requirements as you research and compare technology solutions. Investing the time to create that vision will reduce the amount of time you spend vetting options and help prevent creating a patchwork of stand-alone solutions that don’t talk to each other.

The EServ team went through this same mapping process to create a small business operations software for small service companies like yours. With only partial implementation of EServ in 2021, Millard Sprinkler increased business 20% net over 2020. EServ helped Millard Sprinkler standardize processes across departments, create healthy competition among work crews and complete more work with fewer people.

With Millard Sprinkler’s full implementation of EServ, we’re looking for partners to help us improve and advance its development. If you’re interested in being part of the EServ Evolution, please complete our contact form and a member of our team will be in touch.

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