Posted on 03/29/20 by Justin Barr


Automate working from home CPSAs we continue in these unprecedented and uncertain times, I’d like to do my part to help spur thought and innovation.  You may ask WHY I’m doing this.  I want to help given my vast experience with data, business processes, and technology to share all that I’ve learned from my partners, customers, vendors, and others.  WHAT I will be doing is a weekly post to spur ideas that you may find relevant to you personally or to some other area of your business.  The goal is to help improve your job/company while working at home and make it even more efficient than prior to this virus impacting us.  HOW I will be sharing the information is through a blog post on the Clear Process Solutions website and sharing via a LinkedIn post.


Week 3/30/2020

So you’ve been asked to work at home and all of a sudden you have more time than when you were in the office.  You may ask yourself “why?”.  The Clear Process Solutions team has been working at home since the inception of the company in 2013.  Our employees have learned that a routine quickly cures this shock of feeling alone and like you are on an island.  Why do you have more time?  Think about all the time spent:

  1. Walking to meetings
  2. Having discussions at the water cooler
  3. Unplanned co-worker visits to discuss either critical business problems or just to catch-up

My non-fact based gut tells me you are adding at least an hour a day back into your schedule (plenty of actual research out there to back this up).  So the question comes to mind, what do you do with this time?

If you were to ask me, I would say “Make your job better by automating it”

I was told by a trusted advisor if you want to move up in your organization, you need to train others to do what you do.  How easy could this be accomplished if you were leveraging technology to do the heavy lifting of your job?  EASY!  Once automated, you could just transfer the knowledge to your team member.  You may be on the side that says “I love my job and I don’t want to move up.”  That is ok too, but this still applies to you.  Think about what you dislike about your job.  Some examples:

  1. Gathering data from multiple business systems to prepare reports
  2. Sending dozens or hundreds of emails to track down status of: RFPs, project tasks, shipments, approvals for x, etc.
  3. Entering data in one or multiple line of business systems that takes X hours

What can you do with an extra hour a day?  You can pick the thing you don’t like the most about your job and apply simple technology to make it better. 

I’d like to share a personal story. I lead our sales team and one thing that was taking me 3 to 4 hours to do was the sales forecast.  Because of the ever-changing landscape of sales, the time I was spending to do forecasting was ridiculous and when I was finally done…things changed!  This deal moved to next month because of x, this deal moved into this month because of y, and this old customer contacted me and they want this by Friday which was never in the forecast to begin with.  It happens all the time and it’s frustrating.  So how did I deal with this?  I took two data sources: 1) sales rep forecast by month and 2) the CRM opportunities and created a dashboard.

Within minutes I can now download the data sources, refresh my dashboard and provide up-to-the-minute sales numbers. 

The beauty is I didn’t even need to involve IT.  Technology exists today to enable you to better your job WITHOUT someone else’s help.  You just need a reason, a pain, and a little bit of initiative or help to get started.  To answer the burning question “how long did the dashboard take to develop?”… 1 hour a day for 5 days!  Yes, 5 hours and my pain has gone away. 

Let’s #automatetogether. Contact me on LinkedIn or contact the CPS team to discuss how to make your job and company better while working from home. 


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