The Full Package

Corporate chauffeur services are perfect for transporting employees and visitors. If they have clean cars, good drivers and great customer service it all goes well. What if their invoices are poorly formatted, difficult to read or omit cost centres though?

Plenty of times I have written about our booking system at DrivenByQ. What I have rarely mentioned however is how our information flows and how the quality of data is maintained. It is especially evident in any documents we produce.

At DrivenByQ our database automatically produces invoices. It populates a neatly formatted pdf with Purchase Order number, cost centres and a full breakdown. It then attaches it to an email, ready to send to a designated recipient.

We believe when customers receive our invoices this way, they are quicker and easier to process. After all, why would you want to save money on a chauffeur service only to cost the accounts department more processing and administration time?

Throttle Control 2

Having completed our financial trading year, I have been analysing figures. I’m glad to say that we are up again on the previous year – by some 33.5% in fact.

 

So, would we like more growth? As an ambitious company, it may seem straight forward but from another angle, accelerating growth might not be such a good idea.

 

Increasing our turnover will mean changing our VAT structure, accounting system and even tweaking the business model. Not to mention any HR challenges.

 

Maybe we should stay with our current system a bit longer and build up capital? After all implementing a new marketing plan could potentially be destabilising!

The Big Question

Over the last few months we have witnessed a sizeable increase in activity and turnover. At the moment the increase is manageable. There is seemingly more work developing though which isn’t through any marketing efforts – it is purely from our reputation.

An increase like this is fantastic but it poses an issue. For example, when demand increases our resources need to coincide. So the question is, does the increase in activity represent a spike or is it a new normal?

Should we continue working harder temporarily or should we recruit? Add the fact the recent economic conditions have distorted our historical data and you get a less than clear picture from our statistics.

To compound the issue we have limited information on new accounts (gained in the last year) to analyse their trends. Perhaps we should just ditch the analysis and do something old-fashioned like rely on instinct?

My Fault, I Did It

Last week I wrote about implementing 5S and bringing problems to the surface. This week we discussed it at our monthly management meeting and it led to a much deeper conversation about our approach to mistakes.

Now, in an ideal world there would never ever be a mistake by anyone, anywhere. However, we are all human and occasionally we have to accept that introducing a new process and growing a business will possibly lead to a mistake occurring.

I personally believe the way we deal with mistakes as individuals and as an organisation is what really makes a difference in our development. It is all too easy to create a blame culture or defensive attitudes.

In contrast, creating an environment where people can hold up their hand and openly admit something went wrong without fear or blame is something I want for DrivenByQ. The reason is ultimately that culture will develop to excellence.

Muda To The Surface Please

Most people are familiar with the term ‘mass manufacture’. Henry Ford was a pioneer in implementing the production line and achieving economies of scale. However, I am not sure if as many people are as familiar with ‘lean manufacture’? Since the 1970s Toyota has been associated with its increasing popularity.

After reading ‘The Machine That Changed The World’ I became aware of lean and the effects it had in reducing costs, improving quality and enhancing performance. Terms like ‘Just-In-Time’, ‘Kaizen’ and ‘Right First Time’ have a lot of deep theory and cultural changes behind them.

Part of the ‘lean’ approach involves a practice called 5S. The five parts are Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardise and Sustain. Implementing 5S can reveal waste (or Muda) by bringing problems to the surface so they can be examined, understood and eliminated.

Our new Duty Manager System has increased our admin work and some errors have occurred. The most important thing here is to encourage the admitting of mistakes when they happen. Only then can we find solutions which standardise our approach and ensures the same mistakes cannot happen again.