I have found that I a few solid mentors I have learned from (one being the school of hard knocks) that you ask, “Why?” (A LOT), intimately understand what your business is (what you sell to pay the light bill), understand why you chose the way your information flows, and finally if this all makes sense?

From there, you can get your arms around the animal of your business – and apply technology to automate the processing bottlenecks and speed processes – not “fix” human or process problems.

Very well said, Greg.

I have found that I a few solid mentors I have learned from (one being the school of hard knocks) that you ask, “Why?” (A LOT), intimately understand what your business is (what you sell to pay the light bill), understand why you chose the way your information flows, and finally if this all makes sense?

From there, you can get your arms around the animal of your business – and apply technology to automate the processing bottlenecks and speed processes – not “fix” human or process problems.

Very well said, Greg.

Try this one:

A selling professional works 6 months on a solution for an account. From day one, the monthly cost of the solution was 100% of the cost the company was incurring in 8-part, pre-printed forms. Day one. This was the easiest calculation to make, had the most significance, and should have been enough for the company to jump in with both legs.

There is more -

By having Picking tickets print in the inventory control department instead of them being generated in accounting and “walked” out back, the number of lost orders would be reduced to 0 – when one order is lost a month (unbelievably, this was a fact) the costs associate with this occurrence reached into the tens of thousands of dollars – each time.

After an unbelievable amount of negotiations the deal was signed and the project launched – and as you can guess, the nightmare began…3 years later, the solution is still not fully implemented.

Many lessons learned.

I have a saying, “An EDM solution is like a magnifying glass – it makes the good thing better and the bad things worse…”