John Linton .......but life continues to change and move away from the scenarios on which any organisation originally based its original automated systems and more 'new' people need to introduce their own concepts and ideas and then ensure they work.
The strange residential order inflow continues with yesterdays orders exceeding this date last year by over 500% and the first three days of the new year by over 400% - very, very peculiar. All other order streams are pretty much as expected at this time of year.
It is still very quiet in Exetel's North Sydney offices with all but two or three sales people on leave and only a few accounting and engineering personnel at work....a situation duplicated, I would think, in almost every other business around Australia. It makes you wonder how this has come about over the years and why so many commercial entities have fallen in to the habit of assuming that 4 weeks of the year can be eliminated from the calendar in terms of 'normal' business activities. But it is the case and it has to be dealt with on the terms that have developed over the years and there is, almost, nothing that can be done about it....but you must always try to take advantage of different circumstances if you can think up ways of doing that.
One of the things that most Exetel employees take for granted, including me, is that almost every process within our operations is highly automated and that we will continue to automate all new processes as they become necessary to the same very high degree. That is certainly true for almost all of the processes we have put in place to date and most, if not all, of those processes have been 're-automated' to meet changing conditions within our own and our suppliers operations - several times - over the past eight years since ADSL orders used to arrive by fax and payments used to be processed, one at a time, manually by me calling out credit card numbers and amounts to Annette who would key them into a POS device. Nothing like doing a really tedious and accuracy demanding job late at night, every night of the week, to become an enthusiastic proponent of automation. What few, if any, people realise within Exetel is that they have to play their parts in introducing new automation - it didn't just happen 'by magic'.
I have noticed over the past year or so that manual processes are creeping in to our daily operations (because so few/no current employees do anything about automation as did in the past) and that there isn't the same rigour as there once was to automate all new processes and to keep re-looking at all old processes to see what manual aspects of them can be further/better automated via newer technology or just brighter ideas. Perhaps this is an inevitability of adding more and more new people in to an ever thinning management structure. Perhaps we are just hiring less able people and our original able people have lost their enthusiasm and sharp eyed ness. Whatever the reason we are in danger of eventually losing the competitive 'edges' that our very strong automation program had delivered on over the eight years of our existence.
We need to do something about understanding how to re-address the ongoing automation of our repetitive processes but I am not sure how to go about that. I have thought about it over the last few days - mainly piqued by the strange increase in residential orders that the automated systems put in place so many years ago were dealing with (in the absence of almost all our residential sales and provisioning personnel) which made me realise that it has been a long time since I have reconsidered that aspect of our business - as one obvious example. A great deal of food for thought.
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