Costel Mazilu: Today we are talking about artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, technologies that optimise our work in the office or at home. We are talking about interesting things that generate information that we need to analyse, manage and optimise and we come back to the business side and we think about what we can do with so much information because the hardware helps us, the technology helps us, but the procedures and the way we analyse that information are becoming more and more complicated and we need some solutions that are at the basis of the business and at the basis of our activity. We’ll be talking this evening with two guests who have decades of experience in the field of optimization, both from the perspective of procedures and the technologies and applications that do it. I will ask the experts to introduce themselves.
Alin Niță: Good evening and thank you for the invitation! I am Alin Niță and I represent FivePlus Solutions, a company that has been operating on the market for over 12 years. Personally, I’ve dealt with everything that means information management and document management. I understand the internal processes of an organization. From this came the need to develop specific applications for this area and I moved on to other areas such as sales orientation – areas that companies should be looking at.
Aurelian Iuscu: Good evening, my name is Aurelian Iuscu, I am the representative of Business Future Solutions and I am an engineer economist by profession. I started from the bottom, in a multinational. I worked in the area of projects – organization, large restructuring projects, followed by gaining extensive experience in process optimization, in a process optimization direction. Since 2012 I have been in the private area and I say that we have the chance, together with my teammates, to build successful projects applying some tools from an optimization methodology that we will probably discuss this evening.
Costel Mazilu: As much as time will allow us, because as we were discussing before we went on air, when the discussion starts, you realize how little time you have and how many things you want to say and you don’t think you will succeed until the end of the show. We’re talking about entrepreneurs who start a business, start to be successful, start producing or actually working in their field and they run into some repetitive activities that could be streamlined or done better. This probably starts first from an analysis of those processes, but for some it is enough to adopt some IT solutions that are more or less suitable at the beginning. What are the real challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners when starting a business?
Alin Niță: By the time you grow up you may not need all kinds of tools to help you organize. The time when things get rushed is when you start to have people you manage, everyone is on a specific direction and departments that have to handle tasks. At that point, you growște and the volume of information in the organisation and you end up questioning even simple things, the issues of finding information, what is the latest version of the document, how do you move from a register. For example, how can you move from an Excel in which information is managed to something structured, to get more information in making management decisions.
It’s a threshold that depends on each individual organisation, but it’s a threshold that, at a certain point, depending on the amount of information and the people you work with, you collaborate with, prevents you from dealing with classic systems. I meet a lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of clients who have passed that level maybe after 2-3 years of finding that they can no longer cope with the classic tools. They managed on their personal computer files, contracts, all the documents, but they passed this phase when they couldn’t anymore and they had to keep things under control in another way.
Costel Mazilu: What are the basic software applications and solutions that a business needs to run its business and that small companies have a hard time learning about?
Alin Niță: Well, it would be good if this comes from the fact that you have stumbled upon them and want to implement them. It’s good to know some things though. First of all, you focus on the core business. For the core business, depending on the domain you have, you’re going to focus on the applications that solve your problem: the customer problem, the information management problem that’s related to the business you have. But as you start to grow, all the other collateral applications that, as you rightly said, might be core, start from the fact that I want to classify my documents better, I want my employees to find my information faster where it is structured in the organisation. I want to have all the contracts in a certain order so that if I search, it will quickly show me the expiration date related to the contract, the specific information and many such applications that go into the collaboration and procedure area. Procedures that you really need to have. Or, if you don’t have them, build them.
Costel Mazilu: This is where Aurelian can tell us, because I have a question. So that I don’t make a mistake, so that I don’t talk nonsense, I’d rather come with the questions written at home, which were asked by the right person. OptimizăAre we optimising an existing process or rethinking it altogether?
Aurelian Iuscu: The first stage would be the optimization of the process, because always this part of optimization requires less resources, less expenditure, but you reach a point where its optimization part pays off to a certain extent. As such, you’re in a situation where you have to redo the process, i.e. you end up with a process redesign and that’s in a competitive market. And I would venture to say that this is actually the challenge nowadays, you can go as a first step on this process optimisation side, in other words, look at the process area: people, technology, try to optimise all three big pillars, and then at some point, if however the output of the process, i.e. what you deliver in a competitive market starts to diverge from the voice of the customer, i.e. what the customer wants, you have no choice but to go to the second variant of process redesign and when we talk about process redesign, there are already some more considerable costs involved. You probably have to invest in a new technology, which in real life is quite a large investment and application.
Costel Mazilu: A very good example is when a company has been offered a software that costs 10-20 thousand dollars. A total solution, not just the software or the license. He said that he could buy a second-hand car for that money, how can I pay that much for software? That consultant could have told him that with that money invested in this software he will be able to buy a brand new car in a few years because his own business will be flourishing, că his business will do as well or as badly as before, because he will stick to the same tools, the same procedures or the same lack of properly thought out procedures and processes and where will it end up?
Aurelian Iuscu: In general, here we are also in a trap, i.e. at one point we were working unprocedurally. It’s a business and especially in this start-up area, as entrepreneurs, you start with a number of smaller procedures, related to current activities, after which the business starts to grow organically, you start to have more and more procedures. You’re in a situation where you’ve procedureised what you used to do in everyday life. The question is: When you are doing procedures, haven’t you also done a process that involves some waste? When it comes to this technology part, you ask the question: what does technology do? It speeds up your work. If in these processes you have activities that don’t actually add value, what do you do? You multiply the waste exponentially in a relatively short time.
Costel Mazilu: And you end up doing the work for a leave application instead of using the application or just the written form. You would have to do the application by hand because you have to do it and enter the leave in the application and have it approved in the application by the bosses, who signed on paper and then you would optimize the process to the maximum with the quotation marks.
Alin Niță: Regarding artificial intelligence, it would indeed be good if we all get there as soon as possible. But by then the natural part is eating us up. I think I’ve been talking for about 20 years about what this automation of processes means, this leave application that you mentioned, and speaking of that, we’ve been using them inside the company for many, many years and I still meet people even now who ask me at our company how things work? I show them and it seems natural to me that it works that way. They are surprised that it can be done this way, i.e. it can shorten the time for paper walking. Yes, it really can.
Costel Mazilu: Plus you have a sports board where you can see exactly who is doing what and you can figure out how the holidays overlap because on paper you ask him: surely it doesn’t overlap with the colleague? He says no and then you wake up that the whole company is on holiday.
Alin Niță: In addition to this aspect, a few years ago I made calculations on what a cost reduction would mean if you applied certain IT systems, which are extremely interesting, but also simple and clear. Namely, if in 10 minutes – half an hour you reduce the time searching for information, you can reduce the time spent on the search for information.âor even searching for documents that exist, not to mention the time wasted. The salary that you take, the costs that are associated with that time, you’re going to find that you’re talking about a lot of machines that are collected over the course of the year from 10-15 employees that you have.
Costel Mazilu: Which administrative activities are the most time and resource consuming and can be optimized for software or basic IT applications and do not involve special development or very high costs for a small entrepreneur?
Alin Niță: I’ll give you an example through an application that we have recently put in place and we want to launch it nationally in the next period, an extremely simple application in concept and that is to remind you of a system, an application when you, as an organization, have all kinds of authorizations, certifications, web domain, which you now buy at shorter intervals. These are already clear things. Like having a system that reminds you of these things and you don’t leave them in your own personal agenda, that you put them there or you delegated a person, a person who may have left or forgotten.
It could be human error. It’s a simple application. All these applications are customer management applications. It’s important to have an overview of the customers I have, what I’ve sold to them, what traceability I’ve got with them. They can be more complex systems or simpler systems. A record of contracts is also important. Everyone is customer-oriented. We need to manage such documents that are also economically necessary and I want to keep track of them, meaning people come, they go, they take them in the binder but I want to find the information quickly. Applications for organisations that are carrying a lot of documents with people. Electronic records, apps on the approvals circuit. As you rightly said, leave request but these are all sorts of reports, notes, purchases, that need to flow automated in such a system. These are just a few examples: the car fleet side, the help desk side that you can have at the organization level. Depending on the size of the organisation, because not all companies lend themselves to sophisticated solutions. If you have an e-commerce store, you have a business body, an application that also links to the management and accounting system, you may not need more than one solution.
Costel Mazilu: But you may just have to rethink that process and realize that you can simplify it or eliminate it completely because there are other, more efficient ways to do it, by delegating those things to someone else to do those things exclusively, or whatever other methods Aurelian can tell us.
Aurelian Iuscu: In general, on this part of our business activity we also go on the mentoring side. That is, besides transferring know-how from the optimization perspective, we also provide support for the implementation of projects. So, in other words, we have a minimal contribution and little by little it tends to zero after a certain period of time, between three and four months. I say these things because not infrequently we are in the situation where looking at the activities they carry out on various processes, companies, regardless of their small, large or medium size, are surprised when they look at the actions they do on the division of activities that bring added value that are even without added value and some that are from a business valueling perspective. In other words, I only want to do what the client asks me to do for what they are willing to pay for and then I focus on the business deal activity that I have, doing activities that the client asks me to do.
Of course, at the standard that the customer asks me to deliver in terms of cost, quality, delivery time, I will deliver, he will pay me, but in my daily work I also have activities that are not value-added, for example companies where we have reporting, waiting times and then, when you do these measurable aspects you already realize that you are in a situation where you are wasting a lot of money. This part, related to the previous question you asked, Costel, in general your hard business you don’t outsource. Otherwise, with all the activities you have to go to an area where you minimise them as much as possible in terms of consumption of resources, either human or financial, and at the same time, here I come to what Alin says. If you can automate them, that’s a good solution, because you’re in a situation where you’re just a click away from managing that support activity.
Costel Mazilu: The first lesson that viewers and those business people who sit and think how simple it is and yet I didn’t think about it. I mean you do that job and what you do well and that’s it and leave the little things or those things that take up your time, but bring you very little or nothing at the business level to be done by others or outsourced.
Aurelian Iuscu: Exactly. If it’s with an IT solution, it’s even better. Of course, you’re talking about an initial investment, but it pays off in the medium and long term. You have automated management, which is the era of digitisation, and that’s what we are moving towards.
Costel Mazilu: But this has also become very low cost because there are software-as-a-service solutions. And then the implementation is even easier, it’s also done on different parts of the business, I mean it starts to be implemented company-wide, so you can see if it works or not. You don’t invest in a software or a solution that when it’s ready nobody uses it. And then we get to the point where we make a smooth transition using the knowledge we assimilate through process optimisation and the applications we implement with the help of IT partners.
Aurelian Iuscu: In general, the most difficult process optimizations are those that involve people. Why? Because the day-to-day business has about three main pillars: some processes, a string of activities on which the business is based – it’s the technology part and the people part. This people area is the most sensitive. That’s where the automation doesn’t work anymore, it’s the nature of the human being, which has its pluses and minuses, and then you’re in a situation where the most interesting optimization projects are on this people area, because they are different natures, they are motivational aspects. And here, in general no matter how far science and research has evolved, there are only two big possibilities: the whip and the whipping post. In various forms. You do something wrong, you have to suffer. Within an acceptable limit, of course. If you’ve created performance for the business then you have to be rewarded. That’s why this HR area is a difficult project to manage, but not impossible.
If you want to watch the whole show dedicated to natural intelligence, click on the video below:
