Process Improvement Blog

There's a big scary word in the accounting world, that usually results in allocating resources and lost time - audit.

Small businesses often get the short end of the stick compared to their big business counterparts. What they don’t have in bargaining power and influence they make up for in agility—but being better able to duck and dodge amidst shifting economies, new technologies and endless industry stop-and-go doesn’t pay the bills. And getting paid on invoices—quickly and reliably—is key to every small...

Executive strategy meetings, boardroom presentations and quarterly investor calls aren’t always on the “looking forward to” list for top-level management. These front line execs bear an incredible burden for making the kinds of decisions that can greatly impact employee performance, revenue, financial markets and more.  That said, a green light for building an AP automation system isn’t given...

Controllers come in all shapes and sizes. One may be responsible for leading various accounting managers and their own reports in the direction set by the CFO. Other controllers may themselves be the accounting department and report to the president or owner above them. Regardless of the company they keep, controllers are a company’s financial front line and the responsibility to keep the...

When people hear the concept, “Accounts Payable Automation” they take it either one of two ways: they understand its depth and complexity completely, or the phrase vaguely references “that expensive thing the big companies just started doing” or “that option for businesses without a proven accounts payable process already nailed down.”

Service with a smile, hot coffee and the occasional lollipop for the kiddos was once considered the height of creating a good customer experience in the banking industry. The banking process itself—the lines, the forms, the back-and-forth of showing ID and signing names was accepted as sometimes arduous but necessary. Technology, however, has impacted the ease and speed at which business is...

Regardless of the size of your company or how you structure your accounts payable department (a team, a bookkeeper, an individual company owner), the following two guiding principles for establishing successful accounts payable (AP) processes are universal:

Twenty years ago, customer retention strategies in the insurance business included doing fairly simple things like sending holiday cards or tucking a customer survey into an invoice. Fast forward five years and you were ahead of the game if you used email to make these same connections (bonus if you could personalize these engagements in any way). Today, improving customer loyalty and market...

One look at a post from CNN Money’s "500-page mortgage applications are the new normal" is a reminder that things aren’t how they used to be in the mortgage industry. Sure, there was always a lot of paperwork, but 500 pages? Even loans requiring considerably less paperwork still rely on the efforts of multiple people successfully completing multiple processes for a loan to be closed. Every...

No one has an eye on money more than those in the financial industry, regardless of whether they are an executive or someone who plays a supporting role.  Watch insurance rates flip direction or the Dow drop ten points, and the industry is suddenly abuzz with adjustment.

Within the insurance world, the term “risk” gets thrown around daily. In fact, the industry itself is comprised of a complicated web of professionals with titles like risk manager, risk analyst and others whose job it is to financially protect people, businesses and property against loss while keeping their own “exposure” to these risks as low as possible for the best financial outcomes.

Everyone involved in the purchase of a home knows that seeing a mortgage loan through to the finish line feels more like a marathon than a sprint. The sheer number of individuals and institutions that participate in the process makes it very complicated and time-consuming. But with today’s technology, it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are 6 steps lenders can take to simplify and speed up...

Of all the benefits that digital technology can offer, an uncluttered lifestyle is topping the list. Instead of amassing record collections or stacks of CDs, we download hundred-song playlists to a pocket-sized digital device. Roomfuls of patient records, student data - entire libraries in fact, can now be accessed quickly and securely, in just a few clicks. Not only is digital information...

We've talked a lot about process improvement on our blog, and it can sometimes be tricky to work these strategies into a particular industry.

If you work in the financial industry, whether it's mortgage banking and lending, commercial banking, or hedge funds and other high interest opportunities, you have without fail experienced the pains of overwhelming amounts of paper and poorly maintained processes - employees burdened by busy-work, inefficient processes, and lost documents.

Revenue - it's one of the top-of-mind things for executives and decision makers in any industry. How much money can be made, and how much will it cost to make that money.

Accounting, and specifically accounts payable, is a critical part of any business. It exists from the moment the business is founded, and can very quickly become an overwhelmingly large part of the business's daily activities.

The best and worst part of any accounting department is that it can make or break an organization in an instant.

One of the most redundant tasks in any accounting department is paying invoices. Obviously the business won't function very long without paying their bills, but there has got to be a better way to get the right amounts of money to the right people.

One of the most common ways that companies will get bogged down under their own weight is through poor accounting and financial mismanagement.

The Toronto Globe and Mail covered the BCG report on global manufacturing competitiveness, bemoaning the fact that Canadian manufacturing is lagging, especially behind its North American neighbors. The big issue, they point out, is productivity. Canadian productivity measures are just as screwed up as American measurements with the economists not knowing the difference between productivity and...

Let’s suppose I am a bit of an amateur mechanic and I like to take care of my own car repairs to the extent that I can. Now let’s suppose the water pump on my Buick goes out on a sunny Spring Saturday morning. (Yes, I own a GM product. As much as I admire the manufacturing and business models at Toyota, Honda and especially Subaru, and as much GM bashing as I do in the blog, I unapologetically...

Apparently the folks writing about stratifying inventory into A, B and C items and building calculations of such into ERP packages didn’t get the lean memo.

Wikipedia is typical of such thinkers when they describe the ABC thought process as:

“Why Continuous Improvement May Need To Be Discontinued” – now there is a heck of a title for an article. The guy writing this for Forbes goes on to explain that ‘continuous improvement’ – and he lumps lean, Six Sigma, TQM and ISO into one big glob he calls continuous improvement – is all about efficiency; and efficiency is apparently the enemy of innovation, so the logic goes.

Let’s overlook the...

A consulting outfit helped the folks at the University of Virginia shorten the cycle time of the document editing process for such things as case studies and other teaching materials. The article in the Washington Post describing the improvement says they cut the time from about six months to one, and reduced the number of documents in process from 140 or so to about 26. (Note the correlation...