Commerce Talk

Swivel Chair: Primary Pain Points

Swivel Chair Process—Part Two

In the second segment of his three-part series, Jeff Schaffner, Business Development Manager at Acro Commerce, highlights some of the major pain points that swivel chair processes (SCP) cause in a growing B2B Manufacturing organization. Understanding how SCP impacts time, scalability, data accuracy, employee satisfaction and even data-driven business decision-making is critical to growth. Let’s dive in.

Transcript

Okay, so swivel chair processes pose several challenges. 

These are some of the primary pain points that I found in manufacturing companies that are continuing to grow, but all of a sudden, found stagnation and they're dealing with bottlenecks due to inefficiencies. There may very well be more pain points but here's some of the primary ones.

So, the first one is time is money, is what I'd written it down as. And that basically means it's not just time, but it's also time that could be repurposed. 

It's really important to note that. It doesn't mean that we have to get rid of employees. It just means that that frantic employee from the first video that I had given, as an example, could be doing higher-value tasks that contribute directly to the company's overall goals and objectives.

The second point here is scalability. Which also could be what I've said before as “bottlenecking”. 

As the company grows, so do the overhead costs. A good example would be staffing of new positions. 

So, if a company is North American-based but all of a sudden now they want to go international, and they want to have a global reach, there are a lot of new positions with a lot of old positions being held on to where automation could be, you know, reducing the workload and again repurposing, so,  we can see this cascading effect here.

Employee satisfaction: Obviously, everybody wants to have a strong work culture. No one wants to be stuck doing manual data entry. It leads to unhappy employees. So, dollars and cents are attached to this, not just the culture but also the time invested in hiring and training. Again, when we're talking about 500, 1,000,  5,000, or 10,000 employees, this is becoming a large expense to the company. 

Going full circle back to that person at the computer, we have mistakes. So, mistyping, duplicating or omitting data can lead to inaccuracies. This can affect the decision-making and operational integrity of companies as they again have financial hits when information is put into a system wrong. At the end of the day, mistakes in manufacturing can be quite expensive and can cost the company a lot of cheddar.

The other point and the last point I have here today is data silos. 

So, the swivel chair process can often indicate a presence of a data silo within an organization, and that means - it's basically where information is trapped in a specific department or a system, hindering comprehensive analysis. This means that the information can't be reported on, and therefore, it's hard for strategic planning and growth to happen. Again, you're probably having to do manual data entry to be able to get the statistics and understand if you're doing well or not and which way or capacity you can look to grow.

So that's it for some of the primary pain points.

In part three, we're going to talk about the solutions and the benefits of hiring a digital agency to be able to assist you with getting through the swivel chair process.

Thanks

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