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!
The predictions were that volumes were going to double or triple in the next quarter, we were all exhausted by this stage and many people wanted to leave and have a better quality of life for themselves.
Now I am going to tell you what happened next, what made the big executives run like headless chickens one Tuesday morning. So this is what happened….
We had a big client, not only big, but as corporates like to put it , very very Sensitive!! We were all asked to come to a meeting and not disclose the identity of the client, we were asked to give this client the best service we can ever give, treat this client as if our life depended on it.
This client delivered a lot of work on the first day of business with him, we were all so so busy and getting really tired by the end of the day. Remember we were using Word and Excel to document all the transactions? At the end of the day or shall I say late evening, we all went home only to come back the next morning and see all the big executives already sitting in a room with very worried faces!!. Now, you ask what happened?..as faith wanted there was an enormous mess, actually it was one of the worst mistakes ever to have happened and with? you guessed right, with the new super sensitive client. Apparently, one of my colleagues typed in the wrong client details on the word documents and ALL the client’s top secret transactions went out to ANOTHER client..talk about mess, it can’t get bigger than this..
Now, big boys had only one word in their mouths that day, and it was AUTOMATION…
[...] my recent posts, you have probably got the picture by now that my background is automation. I used to work for a [...]