How are your Information Gathering processes for your business faring?

After reading this, you may want to review what your procedures and processes are actually costing you because whether its collecting information from employees or customers, there are dynamically efficient ways to do it.

Take a look for example at the information you need from an employee when something happens.  Sick leave, Annual leave, Bank account information or change of Bank information, training course information for subsidisation, change of address, vehicle use, and the list goes on.

What about customer information?  You can learn a lot during the making of a sale and establish a secondary target market (if there is enough target support) to generate return customer revenue.  A simple checking of a few boxes on a sales review form on completion of a sale provides the business with invaluable information, while leaving the customer feeling that you are actually interested in making more than THAT sale.

So, back to the employee information gathering.  While I was working as a temp for a major coal mining company, I took the initiative and turned their huge paper munching time consuming employee information gathering process into one page, back and front, gathering all information necessary for any given purpose in one swoop.  One form for everything.  This alleviated time spent looking for a particular form for the particular purpose, eliminated massive amounts of form monitoring and photocopying to ensure forms were available, yes they had one for every need for information, and totally reduced the amount of paper needed, let alone photocopier power, usage and ink or toner.

When I presented the "new all-in-one form" to the Personnel Officer, he took one look at it and the first thing he said was, "Hmm I don't know why this hasn't been done before now, thats smart, very smart, thankyou Tonia".  Needless to say, the Payroll Officer, Administration Officer and the Human Resources Manager just loved the new form.  This was a MAJOR mining company.  You would expect these kinds of processes to exist in such a company.

So my thoughts are;  if a major mining company didnt have such a time and cost efficient process in place, how many small independent business' are there out there that are unaware of such simple time and cost savers just by reviewing their processes regularly and simplifying them?

I hope this helps a business or a company out there, drop me a line or a comment and let me know if it helped.

Have a GREAT day !