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Wasted Away in Businessville

Written by: Gary Silverman

Article Overview: These are lean times, at least according to the media. Whether they are or not still poses an opportunity to do a little belt tightening in areas of your business that are often overlooked. Do you have a supply closet? This is the place where someone in your organization stores all of the office supplies that people feel they need to have.

Wasted Away in Businessville

Often this ordering goes on without any upper level management involvement and when someone hears that there is a new type of scented highlighter that hits the market and they just have to have it...it’s on YOUR nickel. Many years ago I had the good fortune of sitting in on an expense control meeting where we were all admonished for “mailing” paperclips out. Not in a lump sum but attached to various correspondence that we forwarded to clients or vendors. We were told that we were to “replace” said clips with a staple. I thought this was going overboard and had a vision of everyone in the company requisitioning expensive staplers to take the place of the paperclips. Was there a cost savings in that? I did not follow up to see if that in fact had happened but a few years after this meeting I got to thinking. I walked into our accounting office and into the supply room and found that we were stocking thousands of dollars of office supplies that were better off living on the shelves of Office Depot rather than using the cash that we needed to operate the business. To add insult to injury, our office products suppliers had next day delivery so if we were on top of our game we would never be out of anything while needing to stock nothing. So, I put the usual knee jerk reaction in place requiring my approval on any subsequent orders. I did not institute the paperclip mail out program however. Shortly thereafter I found a request to order paperclips. I sprung into action. I secured a box and my controller and we walked up to every desk and work station in the company...with the mission of “collecting” paperclips to redistribute. I was amazed how many cute little magnetic paperclip holders there were out there. In many desks there were full boxes of large, small, cute colored, and Zebra patterned clips. Needless to say we had no reason to order paperclips, perhaps ever again. These types of events are occurring throughout your business. Waste is rampant everywhere and it draws on our natural resources and uses up business resources. We are constantly replacing perfectly good equipment because there are new features available. We have excessive phone, fax, and internet lines. We get bills from vendors without checking their accuracy or if they are charging us according to our contracted agreements. We have extra people, extra copiers, drawers of unassigned cell phones, we continue to pay for beepers and needless subscriptions. Now is the time for you to walk your company, look in the desks, or just share your mission with your team and have them hand things back in and keep those items in your “supply room” You will be amazed at how many hanging file folders your company has. Happy hunting.

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Article Tags: accounting office, business waste, desks, expense control, good fortune, highlighter, insult to injury, knee jerk reaction, lump sum, mail, management involvement, office depot, paperclip, products suppliers, staple, staplers, thousands of dollars, top of our game, upper level management, zebra



Related Forum Posts
Re: What do think you about these statisitcs? - I think those stats are very concerning. Billions of dollars in wasted man hours. You can bet corporate America and frankly international corps are all working on solving this problem. Wasted productivity is no different than wasted/stolen product at the retail level. A few percentage points one direction or another can mean the difference between profit and loss for many companies. If I were the CEO of a large corp, I'd have a team at work blocking Facebook and other social sites from all company computers, as well as unauthorized email accounts etc. Cheers, Zac
Re: What do think you about these statisitcs? - Most large corporations that I worked at did have site blocking enabled. I thought it was a standard. [quote="Zacman":1i1rzvg9]I think those stats are very concerning. Billions of dollars in wasted man hours. You can bet corporate America and frankly international corps are all working on solving this problem. Wasted productivity is no different than wasted/stolen product at the retail level. A few percentage points one direction or another can mean the difference between profit and loss for many companies. If I were the CEO of a large corp, I'd have a team at work blocking Facebook and other social sites from all company computers, as well as unauthorized email accounts etc. Cheers, Zac[/quote:1i1rzvg9]
Re: What do think you about these statisitcs? - You're right, the problem is smaller companies make up a large percentage of the corp world. Particularly if we are talking anything less than Fortune 100. Lots of waste. hmmmm let's see...that money is going where...yep...back to large savy corps. LOL Cheers, Zac [quote="dallasberry":g00ot74i]Most large corporations that I worked at did have site blocking enabled. I thought it was a standard. [quote="Zacman":g00ot74i]I think those stats are very concerning. Billions of dollars in wasted man hours. You can bet corporate America and frankly international corps are all working on solving this problem. Wasted productivity is no different than wasted/stolen product at the retail level. A few percentage points one direction or another can mean the difference between profit and loss for many companies. If I were the CEO of a large corp, I'd have a team at work blocking Facebook and other social sites from all company computers, as well as unauthorized email accounts etc. Cheers, Zac[/quote:g00ot74i][/quote:g00ot74i]
Idea generation by researching - Hi Being one of those that does just that, (Seek and solve), it is utterly interesting to see with what ease some of you think it can get you somewhere. I tend to believe that it doesn’t matter what you "find out" in ways of new solutions to old or new problems there is next to no interest in it all unless you give it away. Samples of what I say can even be found here at Innovateur.com. As a matter of trial I set out three of my solutions in short and brief descriptions and the two responses I got were not in line with the essence of the problem nor posted any secure base for me to build upon. Naturedly this was a huge heartbreak but mostly it points out that if you have an idea or a "project" that you want to realize the task of finding the interest that is willing to do the sacrifice of funds and real intent where the instigator of the idea is a partner often is the greatest innovation in the idea. I have said before that this struggle we inventors and innovators must do just to get attention is not justifiable. A solution that allows us the secure forum to review real insight into what kind of work and solutions we hold is a necessity not only for us but for you too. If the choice is to "tell all" out in the open or be hopeful for better possibilities to come by being silent most of us choose silence. That is the great loss of it all. Some of us are silenced for good. Wasted time and wasted job because we don’t get any benefits of a job well done. I think while it is easy to think things are as described in this thread the reality of the innovators life and prospects by this way or that is far from realistic but more like a war against small minded greed and shortsightedness. Perhaps my mind is clouded from experience of my own struggle but it is experience. We are supposed to learn from that. regards


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