We don't often think about the cost of a process or cost of the flow of information as we are engaged in the act. Day to day we do the work we are taught or the work we created the first time we needed to solve this problem. As creatures of habit, we don't change the way we interact with our daily tasks. Passing our process down to coworkers and people new to the job we continue a habit without thought that often outlives our tenure.
Much of what we do in our current roles involves the flow of information and communication. These are the processes that end up being the most costly as they are often two-sided. Passing the information and receiving/parsing the information. The simplest example is one person speaking to another, as words are said the other person must listen with intent and ask questions if they want to capture the full meaning of what is being said, often people are summarizing the full story. While this example may be extremely simple it is poorly executed daily. Even in this simple back and forth of speaking we have the ability to make mistakes, each additional step added to the process of passing and receiving introduces even more room for error.
Take a step back from your role, look at how the solution that you are enacting came about. Think about what could be done to change it or improve it. When you are creating a solution that you know will have to be done repeatedly over the years, take the time to invest in understanding the problem, and understanding how the process will be repeated and by how many people. Do your best to reduce errors, adding steps for validation along the way is a great way to start. Eliminating steps all together can be even better.
As a longer example, sometimes it is simple tasks that start losing their effectiveness when they are taken to scale. At Life Time, there is was a summer camp that takes place at 230 clubs every year. Each location had a similar process because we all shared the same built-in scheduling system from the '90s. For every kid, there were paper forms galore, each week of camp they wanted to attend they got to fill out a new set. Every class, every birthday party, every event that was hosted at Life Time included a new paper form. Since parents were often filling these out without guidance, there were often errors or missing information. Some of the missing information makes sense, I personally don't want to write my credit card number on a paper form and hand it to a stranger to process later either. This first step has already introduced a high potential for error.
Step two involved people doing data entry into a very unintuitive system, mixed with the turnover rate at Life Time there was a decent amount of information being entered incorrectly because of unfamiliarity with the system. This was also a validation step of sorts since it was where the team was able to identify errors from step one. I say team because there were often 2-3 people spending 8 hours per week transcribing these paper forms into the system.
Step three involved calling parents to get any missing information. Mostly during the day, with an answer rate of maybe 50%, there were some parents that I had to call more than 5 times to get a hold of them. When you are holding a stack of 20 paper forms this can be extremely annoying and time-consuming.
Step four involves filing all the forms. Since the system mainly contains names, payment info, and little other information. The forms are still the source of truth when anything is needed and they are referred to often. It was not uncommon to find a form that was never input into the system, missing from filing, never paid for the camp, and other errors that would need to be corrected. This does give us a second validation step, which is good.
When we think about the scale of this process and start with actual numbers it starts to get pretty clear that it would be worthwhile to build a more robust system, a system that could also be used to replace paper forms that aren't directly related to the summer camp entry process.
What are our variables?
- 2 people at $9/hour
- 8 hours per week for data entry
- 2 hours per week calling parents
- 2 hours of filing and referencing paper forms
- 230 Locations
(2 people * $9/hour) * (8 hours data + 2 hours calling parents + 2 hours filing and referencing) * 230 Locations = $49,680 weekly spend
10 weeks of camp * 49,680 = $496,800 Annual spend on summer camp data entry across all the locations. This number isn't actually that big in comparison to the size of the company and since the Life Time Locations are run almost as separate entities in terms of their numbers it is very difficult to spot things like this. Since with one location, it is less than $200 a week.
So what do I propose? Embrace technology, a simple online form, Typeform would probably be best to experiment with first since it looks great and accepts payment. If you put the results into a spreadsheet it becomes searchable, serving as an easy filing system, and the form itself should limit errors significantly (though there will always be some). Even if you wanted to build this all into your proprietary system you could afford multiple software engineers to replace this annual half-million-dollar process and build something that would likely be able to be used across more processes, departments, and definitely across all the locations. Ultimately saving much more than the conservative calculations here.
This example is a symptom of saying "this is the way it's done", it is an example of not questioning how things are being done after you are taught, and believing that change isn't possible. We owe it to ourselves to improve the way we do things, to use the tools that are available now that may not have been in the past. By looking into and fixing this process we are not only saving time and money. We are reducing frustration and error for both employees and customers. And we are taking 55,000 hours every year and reallocating it to be more impactful.