The Texas Two Step is a classic dance that people enjoy in dancehalls across the country. While repeating the same move for the entirety of a song is enjoyable, having to repeat everything you do at work is detrimental to efficiency and success. Instead of spending extra hours at the office wrapped up in a duplication of efforts, put the effort in only once. This will give you time to go dance the two step later, or anything else you like to do in your spare time.
On a daily basis, System Integrators share how they are duplicating efforts in their work. One colorful story was told by an integrator who spent two hours conducting a site survey with a prospect. He used paper floor plans, pictures on a cell phone, and notes on a yellow pad to track what the customer needed and wanted. He then painfully described spending another hour sitting in the car after the meeting in an attempt to make sense of what he had gathered, and another two hours back at the office refining it for handoff to operations. This story truly represents the definition of duplicating effort; double the effort, double the time!
Putting information in the right place the first time will cut back on time spent in the office, improving both customer and employee satisfaction. These improvements will help to strengthen the environment of the company, which will bolster its reputation in the industry. A company’s reputation is one of the strongest deciding factors in the overall success of its life in the competitive market. If processes are improved, overall satisfaction rates rise and the integrators and system professionals will have plenty of time at the end of the day to go out and dance the Texas Two-Step.
It is important to remember that more is at stake in these processes than efficiency. Effectiveness goes down significantly when the process takes twice as long and has more room for errors.
Customer satisfaction also drops significantly when the information they gave the integrator in the meeting gets misconstrued during the handoff processes. In order to avoid potential negative side effects of effort duplication, let’s talk about how to bring it down to a one step process.
The main cause of this duplication of efforts is rooted in the way an integrator takes notes during a client site walk or customer meeting, as seen by the story illustrated above. A new way of taking and storing site walk notes and photos in one convenient and secure place while performing the walk would be a sure solution. An example of this is System Surveyor’s intelligent system design platform. An integrator with this software can walk the site using a mobile tablet while interacting with the customer, drag-and-drop the elements onto the digital floor plan, type notes, and take pictures for each element as they go (which directly associates to the digital floor plan). This eliminates the paper aspect, the handwriting, and the misplaced photos that are such a hassle. Moreover, it makes the customer experience better by ensuring that the integrator accurately understands the needs without any misinformation passing through to the operations and installation team.
Not only is there an opportunity here to reduce the duplication of effort, integrators can engage customers in new ways by gathering their information in real time and in one secure place. System Surveyor gets the industry away from relying on memory and inconsistent methods of capturing customer needs. This is a giant step towards accuracy and improving the quality of system design. Not only will you have more time for the Two Step at a local dance hall, but you’ll also end up being a hero for your customer (and their stakeholders) by understanding their needs and treating their time with respect.
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