I heard this sentence a few years ago when I was still an employee in a very large corporation. I was sat in a large meeting room, filled with well suited executives. On the meeting agenda was to get suggestions on how the company could cope with higher volumes of transactions. The consensus in the room was that the company needed to hire more employees, train them quickly and get them to turn around the higher volumes. When the meeting was about to close, I said and I remember my exact words :” Why wont we automate some of the processes, so we will be more efficient and save the new headcount and a lot of time and money?”
There was silence in the room and my direct manager had this look on his face begging me to be quiet, but I kept talking about how easy it was to automate some of the simple daily tasks we had to do on a daily basis, such as To-do lists, sending invoices, clients’ updates and how much time this could save the company. As the employees were using Word and Excel to document all their work and it was all very manual and error prone, I was sure everyone will like the idea and thank me for the enlightenment…..
But guess what? the answer I got from the chairman was :”Why should we automate our business? It seems to work anyway? I didn’t answer, but the realisation came a few days later..
Tomorrow I will discuss why EVERYONE should use business automation and reveal what happened in the company.
[...] Yesterday, I told you about a meeting that I attended back then when I was still a hopeful employee in a large corporation. For those of you who have just come across this blog, I will make a long story short by saying that in this very high profile meeting I did the unthinkable and it was to challenge the big executives, which is a complete NoNo in most corporations. My idea to handle high volumes was to automate some of the business, but the executives were all under the agreement that the company should hire more employees instead of automation. In fact, the chairman dismissed the idea completely saying that there was no need to automate anything and everything worked just fine! Well I knew that there were many errors and many problems with all the manual work we had to endure. I even spent nights and weekends along with my other hopeful colleagues to try and cover a fraction of the volumes we had. And guess what? It was only going to get worse much much worse! [...]