“Doing more with less” is a goal we’ve been helping customers achieve recently. Cutting costs, cutting unnecessary tasks, and cutting out the clutter, can all contribute to a lean, efficient, and profitable outcome.
I have listed some ideas below - some are related specifically to Dynamics GP, and some are generic.
- Create a ‘default calendar’ that defines how you want to spend your time in a week or month. Stop allowing interruptions and distractions that take you away from your default calendar. Post the default calendar near your desk to remind you of the hours and categories of time that are critical to your success. Let everything else go that you can, and delegate.
- Push your software systems to their limit; that’s what you paid for. With Dynamics GP, use the time saving features they were designed for:
- Correcting Journal Entries
- Recurring batches
- Macros - for ANYTHING repetitive such as bank transfers and month end
- Don’t enter Account Descriptions, use Tools - Setup - Financial - Segment
- Copy Purchase Orders
- Copy Inventory Items
- Create shortcuts to all your applications, websites, and reports on the Home Page
- Link Sales Orders to Purchase Orders
- Customize your action panes to correlate to your specific work processes to save you time and shorten training time for new hires. (v10 only)
- Learn to say “No”. This may relate to work, school, organizations we belong to, etc. but we should respond similarly: Figure out what you love to do and what your default calendar says you should do, and then decide.
- Scan or enter data once
- Customers, Vendors, Employees should all be in Dynamics GP. If you need them elsewhere, use standard tools to integrate them.
- Use Excel Report Builder to extract GP Data; don’t enter it in Excel!
- Bar Code & RF (radio frequency) scanning systems demonstrate very fast ROI (return on investment) so if you haven’t considered it, now is the time.
- Ask employees to map out their work from start to finish and provide incentives if they can help find efficiencies. Most likely you’ll find that a step in the process can be eliminated or a process can be automated.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this: what have you or your company done recently to improve efficiencies? Or perhaps you would like some guidance? Either way, I’d love to have this post be an interactive discussion on what has worked and what has not.
Tags: more with less
