ProcessMetric helps companies streamline and measure business processes. We are a forms-based collaboration backbone that makes your processes more efficient, more transparent, and will provide metrics to give you insight into the invisible inner workings of your business.
The Problem with Email
Companies use email to conduct many business processes. Email has several problems that ProcessMetric.com solves such as information fragmentation, inability to collect data about business transactions, and inability to collect data about your business processes.
Consider a vendor return process.
- An employee sends an email to a vendor asking for a return for credit. She also copies her boss and the purchasing agent at her company.
- All three “reply all” and now there are three separate emails with information about the return. If they all “reply all” again, then there will be as many as seven different emails with partial information. In other words, there is no single source of truth for the interaction, resulting in information fragmentation—
- Because email is conversational, no data is collected or stored about the matter at hand. If it was a vendor problem, the data about that vendor is lost in a blizzard of emails about that vendor.
- Finally Once the return has been processed, the emails will in all likelihood be eventually deleted, and no information about the individual transaction or trends across similar transactions will be available. Trends about how your transactions with your vendor take place are lost and only subjective anecdotal remembrances remain.
Transparent and Structured Collaboration
For recurring business interactions, companies need a structured and transparent way to collaborate. Consider how your company handles some of the following processes that require some back-and-forth collaboration:
- Employee vacation requests
- New hire requisitions & on boarding checklists
- Employee off-boarding tasks like deactivating computer access and returning equipment
- Expense report approvals
- Vendor returns
- Preventative Maintenance inspections that require follow-up
- Follow-up on Quality Control inspections
- Customer Service interactions like change orders, returns and credit requests
- Request for Proposal (RFP) and Request for Information (RFI)
- Financial Controls Process Documentation
- Security and IT Controls Documentation
Are these processed done via email? Can everyone involved see what is happening? If someone in the is sick, does the rest of the department know what is going on or is it hidden in their email or locked away in a file cabinet?
ProcessMetric can streamline communication and aide in transparency to everyone who needs to participate. All forms can be customized and allow you to track whatever information you need to for searching or reporting purposes.
Workflow
ProcessMetric includes role-based workflow tools to enable you to design your own approval and escalation processes for each form.
This can help with
- Sarbanes Oxley reporting requirements
- Financial Audit controls
- Security Audit controls
- HRIS process management
The workflow engine is not just limited to people your own company, either! You can assign a form to people at other companies. For instance you may want to submit an approval to a vendor or send a customer’s change-order request back to them requesting additional information.
Security
ProcessMetric keeps your information safe in three ways.
First each user can control visibility to comments, which are like social-media for your forms. Consider this scenario:
- A customer submits a change-order request. It is routed internally from the Customer Service group to the Operations group to see if they can accommodate the change. Operations types in some notes that they don’t want to share with the customer, so those notes are flagged as only visible to people within the company. They can also choose them to be visible only to their own department. When Customer Service ultimately forward the form back to the customer with a question, the customer only sees notes that are appropriate.
Second, all data fields can be controlled for each form. They can be made editable, read-only, or invisible based on the status of the form and based on whether the user is “internal” (someone from your company) or “external” (someone like a customer or a vendor outside of your company. Again, consider this scenario:
- You receive a defective product from a vendor and need to return it.
- Your QA group creates form, enters inspection notes and chooses the reason-code of “Defective” product on the form (vs. damaged in shipment, etc.)
- Upon saving the form, form fields the QA group entered becomes read-only to permanently memorialize their input. A new section appears that the Accounting group will use to track the progress and confirm when they receive the credit.
- When it is forwarded to the vendor, the vendor can only see the QA group’s notes (read only, of course). The accounting group’s area of the form is invisible and an active field appears into which the vendor enter the Return Authorization number and, if they are shipping replacement product, the date it will ship.
The Third way ProcessMetric keeps your data safe is that , each company only has access to its own metrics when doing trend analysis on your forms data and processes. Even if a form is forwarded to someone outside of your organization, like a vendor or a customer, they will not be able to run any metrics against your company’s forms.
Measuring your Processes
As ProcessMetric.com streamlines business processes, it also tracks two primary types of data about those processes: data within the forms (Business Data) and data about the process itself (Process Data)
Does your company know these kinds of Business Data?
- Which vendors tend to have the most returns?
- Which products tend to get return to vendors most frequently?
- Which what are the common reasons products are returned to your company?
- Which customers request the most changes after they send you an order?
- How many expenses or miles did an employee log for a particular project?
- How long does it take to approve a credit request?
- Did we finish off-boarding a terminated employee in a timely fashion?
How about the following kinds of process data?
- How much time does it takes from the time a credit request comes in to when it is approved or declined?
- How long does take for a vendor to approve or deny an return authorization request?
- How long does it take for that vendor to send a new product or issue the credit?
- Which employees are process the most forms in their area?
- How many open forms are in each employee’s work backlog?
- How many change requests are waiting on customer feedback?
Our robust reporting system allows you to quickly slice and dice your data using bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and Pareto charts. It can even be used to support data collection as a part of Lean or Six Sigma events to help measure processes, even over a short amount of time.