As we have already seen in a few posts in this series, continuous monitoring and relevant actions are the key factor for success. One of those actions is to reduce IWMS waste.
Today’s teaching
Your IWMS project is besides ERP implementations probably one of the most intensive implementation procedures. Only those organizations that effectively communicate and cooperate during the implementation phase will eventually benefit the most from an Integrated Workplace Management System.
However, implementation is still a project and projects have an end date. After a go-live unavoidably there will be less commitment to the IWMS. This is a logical result of any implementation. The project team will be decommissioned and people return to their daily tasks.
Without the go-live deadline present people tend to produce enormous amounts of waste in your IWMS. This waste needs to be eliminated as soon as possible as waste will negatively impact not only your systems performance, but even worse, will provide your management with the wrong data to base their decisions upon.
An Integrated Workplace Management System is a strategic management tool and should be considered and treated as such. Therefore your task today is to eliminate as much waste as you can from your IWMS.
7 Sources of waste
Within your IWMS there is a lot of waste that is potentially ready for removal. This waste occurs on functional, technical and organizational level. Although not all items might apply to your IWMS, this list will help you to identify the waste within your IWMS.
Work orders
Undoubtedly one of the most waste producing elements within your IWMS is work orders / service requests, simply caused by the significant number of it. I have come across quite a few organizations that register more than 1 million trouble tickets annually or even more.
Having that immense number of trouble tickets in our mind, you can probably imagine that some slip through, are not closed correctly or simply haven’t been resolved at all.
To reduce functional waste in your IWMS, you can use a combination of filtering and reporting. My advice is to create a report with outstanding trouble tickets that have been outstanding for more than three months. These tickets will most likely never be resolved in a correct way.
Most Integrated Workplace Management Systems support some kind of archiving functionalities for trouble tickets. Using archiving functionality is one of key waste cleaning functionalities within your IWMS and I would certainly recommend the usage of it.
Contracts
Another example of waste producing functionalities is contracts. The waste contracts produce is immense both in terms of money and data integrity. To reduce the waste of contracts you can evaluate your contracts based on the following criteria:
- Lifecycle – Most contracts have a certain lifecycle. Ensure to archive contracts which have been expired / terminated. These contracts will only reduce the data quality.
- Critical dates – To analyze which contracts need to be terminated / cancelled you need to create a report on critical dates. Ensure to create follow up actions for contracts that have passed a critical date. By terminating contracts that do not contribute to your organization, you reduce the waste of contracts both in terms of money as in data quality.
- Unlinked contracts – Within your IWMS you will find a lot of contracts that are not linked to departments, tenants, landlords, budgets or other important elements of contract. To reduce these contracts you should create a report that will give you insight in the number of unlinked contracts. These contracts either need to be archived, or deleted from your IWMS.
Staff
In most IWMS implementations I have been involved in the organizations’ employees will directly be imported from some HR system or ERP system. A mid-size organization already has more than a couple of thousand staff records that need to be imported in your IWMS.
Although interfaces are considered to be reliable, the data is not. Over the years the data in other systems has been polluted due to various reasons including:
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Reorganizations
- On and Off Boarding
That polluted data will also be loaded in your IWMS. To reduce the waste from staff in your IWMS you need to:
- Identify people not with the organization
- Identify double records
- Identify not complete records (cost center, address, department, etc.)
When you create reports that can identify those employees you can start to reduce the pollution of your IWMS data.
Processes
Within every organization there are numerous processes that are in the IWMS but not used at all. Especially mergers and acquisitions have a significant impact on processes as different organizations support different processes. As organizations merge some processes will not be supported whereas other processes and services will be introduced.
However, your organization doesn’t have to in a merger or acquisition to allow you to reduce the waste from processes. If you want to evaluate your processes you need to know what processes are used in your organization and what processes are not.
You can discover this data in a few ways that I have already discussed on Day 11 about optimizing processes.
User Groups and Users
Another common source of waste in your IWMS is the users and user groups. Users and user groups are created during implementation and by functional administrators as they go. In most cases within a couple of months your IWMS is filled with users that:
- Don’t belong to any user group, or
- are test users
- are inactive
These users pollute your IWMS with unnecessary user data. If you want to reduce that waste from your IWMS you need to:
- Identify users that don’t belong to any user group, are test users, or are inactive by a report
- Archive these users if you want to keep their records for feature usage
- Delete these users
Log files
All Integrated Workplace Management Systems produce log files which can consume enormous amounts of disk space and can negatively impact the performance of your IWMS.
To reduce the waste produced by log files I recommend to:
- Identify log files together with IT and the vendor
- Separate critical from non-critical log files
- Delete all non critical log files
Reports
As with users and user groups reports tend to be used for testing purposes a lot. I have encountered some customers that have an immense load of unused, non-critical reports that pollute your IWMS. Because this pollution is totally unwanted you should:
- Identify non-used reports
- Delete those reports
- Use naming conventions for reports.
Any report that is not constructed according to naming conventions should either be deleted or renamed.
Today’s task
In today’s teaching I have put forward 7 ways to reduce waste in your IWMS. However, most important about eliminating waste from your IWMS is frequency. You need to put procedures in place that guarantee the periodical cleaning of your IWMS. Just as you frequently clean your pc by removing files and defragmenting, you need to frequently clean up your IWMS.
Your task for today is to:
- Pick four from the seven waste reduction sources discussed above
- Reduce the waste based on the advice
- Setup up a waste removal frequency
- Distribute actions to responsible persons.
I would love to hear what kind of IWMS waste you suggest!
Good luck
