Commerce Talk

What is a "Swivel Chair Process"?

Swivel Chair Process—Part One

In the first segment of his three-part series, Jeff Schaffner, Business Development Manager at Acro Commerce, discusses one of the largest inefficiencies in mid-market manufacturing and B2B operations. Manually transferring data between systems, something we call a swivel chair process, is exceedingly common in growing organizations. Learn how swivel chair affects business and what we can do to help you combat it.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Jeff Schaffner with Acro Commerce. 

We specialize in helping B2B companies streamline their operations through digital solutions. 
Another way to look at this is that we help companies with their online infrastructures, for example. 

Today, I want to be discussing, in this three-part series, I want to discuss a common issue that we see when it comes to the midmarket and enterprise-level companies looking to continue their expansion—and that is an issue with the swivel chair process.

So, what exactly is a swivel chair process? 

It's a manual method of transferring data between two or more systems or applications that aren't directly integrated or connected.

So, if you wanted to imagine you have this overworked employee, and they're frantically putting in information, to the best of their ability, let's they're not making any errors, of course, and then you know when they're done working on one spreadsheet or inputting information in one area they're literally kicking off their chair and sliding over to another area to be able to put information in a different section. 

So, as you can imagine, just picturing that is a bit humorous, but it also demonstrates serious inefficiency within business operations.

In the next section, let's discuss the challenges, specifically the swivel chair process and its financial impact on a company, and then, in part three, we'll discuss some of the solutions.

Thanks

---

Is swivel chair impacting your operational efficiency?

Contact our team today to learn how to improve workflows and integrate systems to reduce ineffective manual processes.