Gagan Goraya

With the focus on cost cutting during the recession period, all companies are looking ways to stretch a dollar. In my experience, IT budgets in transportation industry are already very tight so many of you wonder if that option even exists.

I have read many articles on cost cutting strategies, and some make perfect sense and are simple to exercise; others however, require a complete shift in the IT strategy along with significant initial investment. Knowing that spending a lot on capital investments might be out of question, my focus would be to highlight strategies that can result in some “quick wins” without changing the entire IT strategy or high initial costs.

Over the next few weeks, I will try to discuss my Top 10 lower you IT expense techniques. Due to the lack of time, discussion will be kept at high level. I will be breaking this discussion into three separate blogs so it is easy to read and digest. If there are any question, comment or feedback please email me, I will try to clarify as much as possible.
Please keep in mind that the importance will vary from company to company based on their environment.

1) Automate time-intensive repetitive processes

In market slowdown organizational focus shifts to business process automation. Simultaneously, managements might be looking for an overall reduction in IT costs. Since both of these cannot be achieved at the same time therefore either we can trim our expectations by shortening IT to-do-list, or maintain IT costs while trying to accomplish more. There are many things you IT department can do to help reduce overall operational costs. Things to keep in mind are that priority should be given to projects with defined objectives; significant returns; and realistic expectations. Any long term projects, which will extend over multiple months, should be kept on hold until business conditions starts to improve.

There are number of administrative tasks that can be quickly automated with little IT support. These types of projects result in quick ROI due to onetime upfront cost resulting in ongoing savings. Some of the examples of time intensive tasks are Time-card entry, POD entry, A/P entry, A/R entry, and so on. Often accounting departments require a segregation of expenses into proper G/L accounts by terminal or cost centre. In many cases, work might be performed at separate physical locations making the business process inconsistent, complex and costly. Automating manual processes that fall in these categories can result in quick cost savings, as well as, help improve the overall business process. In addition, projects like this are not platform specific; they can be programmed into your legacy application or a separate auxiliary application with an interface back to your legacy system.

2) Document Management / Optimization

Document management is abroad topic. This can be a system, methodology, or a process. In all cases, the focus is to create, maintain, and to provide access to electronic documents effectively and economically.
Transportation and logistics industry tend to be highly paper intensive and part of the service offering includes maintaining paper work for suppliers and customers. The key is to take correct approach; one that will allow organization to do it quickly and easily while maintain low costs. There are plenty of cost effective solutions available in the market to support your needs in this area. Most large companies already have some electronic means to capture documents and file them. For those who don’t can easily find local vendors selling document management software. In my opinion this is a key system that every transportation company should have, especially for those who are required to keep documents for a long period of time. When searching for a solution, aside from cost, scalability is also a key factor. A good system will grow as your needs grow, and comes with good vendor support.

The biggest pitfall is that organizations don’t have a defined plan for their imaging system. Most organizations start with a decentralized model where terminals, departments and employees start to maintain their individual repositories of scanned documents. By the time, they seriously start looking for an organization wide solution; there are so many sudo-imaging systems which need to be integrated. To make things easier priority should be to spend time on analyzing individual business requirements before selection of a tool and implementation.

3) Implement an Email Policy

This may be a simple yet very fruitful venture. Email is probably the most useful technical achievement of the 20th century. It has certainly transformed the way we conduct business. However it has also created our business lives very demanding. Although it is not an easy task to control external senders there is certainly something we can do to control number of emails. Promote using phone calls over emails. Ideally if the email message that you are reading is going to take longer than five minutes to read and respond, it needs to be a phone call. In the future articles, I will list the golden rules that can keep your inbox empty.
What can an email policy have to do with cost savings? Well, perhaps not at individual level; however to an organization, an ill-managed email policy can result in significant management costs. You may ask what kind of things an Email policy encompasses. Few of things that can be part of an email policy are:
• Deletion of redundant emails; especially duplicate ones
• items that should be handled by phone versus emails
• Education on who gets CC’d on the emails.
• Limiting number of mailing list within an organization
• Creating rules to delete older items and automatic filing
• Enforcing email quotas

more to follow soon...

Gagan Goraya

Feedback

Note: Special thanks to ctl.ca for allowing me to write a blog on their platform, especially Mr. Lou Smyrlis.