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Showing posts from October, 2020

Field Technician Performance Evaluation

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  The value of a Mobile Workforce Solution Background An employee performance evaluation or appraisal is a review of the employees’ overall contribution to the organization. It is an evaluation of the employee skills, achievements, and growth – or the lack thereof. Performance evaluations are used to provide feedback on performance over a specific period of time. Besides the feedback are performance reviews also used to justify adjusted remuneration as well as possible corrective actions. Corrective actions could include re-deployment, additional training and in some extreme cases even service termination. The idea of employee performance review is sound from a managerial perspective. The system performance review however is not without problems. The problems that rise from this intervention happens because of human involvement in the process.   This article will look at some documented problems associated with the process of employee performance review for technical staff in

Your Word is Your Bond

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  Introduction  Today we live in a world, and in a society, where corruption is rife. It seems that everyone is trying to wrangle their share of the pie irrespective of the cost to their fellow man or to society at large. With corruption comes the question of trust. Can the next person be trusted with what was being said and promised? Is the next person of good character and worthy to be trusted? In previous generations when the world was less connected and communication was not technologically supported, a persons’ handshake was sacred. The handshake sealed the deal and every participants’ word was his or her bond. Stated in simple terms, a bond is an agreement with legal force. But it is true that we no longer live in a world where our words are our bonds. The world has shrunk to a global village and everybody is connected in the digital world. Handshakes have been replaced by large volume contracts with a multitude of signatures. These contracts are in a sense the life-blood o

When is your company going Paperless?

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  What is Wrong Using Paper? Paper has been part and parcel of companies for great length of time. Paper are being used for record keeping and is at the heart of business processes. Paper documents are light and flexible – makes them easy to handle and store. But paper is also fragile, tedious to copy and difficult to transmit over multiple locations.   To file, store and retrieve paper records is an expensive exercise. The cost of paper systems is enhanced by printing and copying equipment, fax machines, inks, and other office supplies. Paper records take up space with filing cabinets and boxes of archived folders. Space that could be released for revenue generating business processes.   Paper-based systems is time consuming. Employees have to wait upon each other for the release of reports and summaries. The retrieval of important documents could get very time-consuming with misfiled or misplaced documentation. There is also the added risk of important documentation getting des

Can you afford not to implement a MWS

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  Competitive Advantage users can see improvements within multiple departments. Implementing the software helps to keep you ahead of the competition because you no longer run the risk of making costly business mistakes, which could place you behind the pack instead of ahead Improved Process Efficiency An ERP solution eliminates repetitive processes and greatly reduces the need to manually enter information, which not only improves user productivity, but it eliminates the possibility of inaccurate data which could lead to making costly business mistakes. The implementation of an ERP system will also improve daily business activities by streamlining business processes, which makes it easier and more efficient for companies to collect data, no matter what department they’re working in Accurate Forecasting Enterprise resource planning software gives your users, and especially managers, the tools they need to create more accurate forecasts. think ahead and properly plan what they need from

Service Team Empowerment with Technology Tools

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  The teams send to customer sites faces the customer. It is not the office staff or the manager. It is the client facing service team and technicians that represents the company. And it is this service team and technicians that must be empowered to deliver a superior customer service. Superior customer service brings repeat business for a company. The reality is that service teams that have been empowered with IT solutions, obtain information faster which in turn can influence superior customer service.    Let the truth be known. Companies that are still operating on pen-and-paper based systems are in the majority and their systems are error-prone. These manual systems hinder agility and productivity. Manual systems include waiting for service teams to return back to the office, submit paperwork which is fed into an excel spreadsheet. Resolving disputes based on these manual systems can be cumbersome.    To overcome some of these problems with technology, workflows can be combined int

Business Operations: Can you enter the same river twice?

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  “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he’s not the same man” – Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher.   I came upon this saying of Heraclitus soon after graduating from university. At that stage of my life I knew that I knew a lot more than everybody else (or so I thought). And this saying of Heraclitus made no sense to me. Of course you can step into the same river twice. The river is still there, the flow has not changed and nor has the name changed. So how can you not step into the same river twice I asked myself? And of course, there was no answer to the question.   As my corporate career advanced, along with the greying of my hair, the saying started to make sense to me. It dawned on me that the only certainty that there is in life and in business is change. Nothing stays the same forever. Change is the only constant.  If I step into the river, it is only a small part of the river that is being disturbed. Some of the riverbed might have shifted. Wh