Rob Dawson, Business Development Manager from ServiceScaler, gets together with Marty Lewis, Director of ORB Services, to discuss business improvement from the perspective of both a management consultant, and an IT business analyst, with some random tangents of interesting topics along the way.

There are some great topics for tech and non-tech people alike including business processes, digital transformation, process automation, and turning process into profit.

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Check out more of what Marty does here - ORB Services

TRANSCRIPT

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Hi, guys. Rob here from ServiceScaler. Today, I have with me Marty Lewis from ORB Services.

She’s had Marab. Much appreciated.

No worries, mate. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

So what we might do is just do a bit of an introduction of ourselves, who we are and what we’re doing. So I will let you start.

Happy to take off. Yes.

Consulting business for the three different industries that I sort of work with, so professional services, tradings and medicos, so that the three sort of industries, but the the nuts and bolts of what I do is really helping business owners get control back of their business. Sometimes I’ve been in business for five, seven, 10 years. All of a sudden the business runs you more so than you running the business. And my role is to start looking at why is that happening? Where can we make some changes? And looking at the planning that you’ve got in place, the people, the processes and the pulse of your business, make sure that we get all those things working so that you can actually start to steer the ship a bit more productively.

That’s awesome. That’s a much nicer introduction than I’m going to give for myself, because what I do is a lot more basic than that. So the service geiler obviously is NITI Solutions or services provider into the legal sector. So we specialize in doing I.T. systems for law firms.

Yeah, it’s all about the I.T. stuff. So anything related to cybersecurity where Microsoft partners, so we do lots of Microsoft three, six, five stuff moving people to the cloud. We’ve got good knowledge around how legal businesses work and the types of technology that legal businesses need to be successful.

That said, my background is actually far more diverse than just legal in the technology space. Former systems admin. I’ve been and done business analytics process automation, lots of stuff in lots of different areas. So since then I’d say business analysts. So a wealth of potentially useful knowledge, but that’s yet to be seen. So we’ll get to that. So. So that’s me. And that’s that’s service gallery. As part of the Motet Group.

Tones made for what was talked about before, I can definitely appreciate that you’re a wealth of knowledge and I might throw you straight under the bus with a test that tests that wealth of knowledge out.

Very good job. When it went off, I mean, if I were to take a law firm as an example, you’ve got different processes from into managing a CRM.

We’ve got to manage a job matter. Management once at once, the client signs on and signs an agreement and it becomes a matter then managing that matter and assigning staff to it for a firm that has maybe done a lot of this file paper or has you know, it’s a small firm, half a dozen staff. Where did they start with actually integrating this into some kind of nice, streamlined, partially or automated kind of process? Where do they start and what are the driving forces that really help them decide on which way to go?

Yeah, that’s a multi layered and complex question. I love it, it’s good. So the technologist in me always would always say stop by going digital. But I think this is probably a question that I can throw back to you in relation to process and having a clearly defined process. So it’s one thing to digitize something. We can digitize anything. And that doesn’t necessarily make it better. It may make it easier, particularly the context of working from home. At the moment, everything has gone digital. But I suspect that most people have gone digital without inherently changing the process or making the process any better. Which sort of defeats the purpose of doing the digital thing. And that comes back to Guy. Well, doing it digital doesn’t make it better.

What we want to do is make it digital so that we can stop automating processes, so we can start integrating things so we can make people’s lives easier. Now, as a management consultant and I should call you a sultan because you’re a consultant without a corn, and I love that about you.

It’s 100 percent true. Tell me, why is it so important that people define the business processes?

Your process is one of those ones, I call it an unsexy part of your business. But the trade off the process is that process becomes profit.

If you do the work in your business efficiently and well, which means different people in your business know their role, different people execute their role. People know where their role starts and their role finishes. And that could be from a marketing and promotions into a sales, into an onboarding, into a job management, into a client delivery. And then from supporting that in a support role to that administration, H.R. one.

All of those pieces of your business need to work well together. And if they don’t, then they’re going to cause friction. And when they cause friction, that eats into your profit. So process isn’t the most sexy part of your business, but everybody is very generally, generally very excited by the fact of improving their profits. And one of the easiest ways for people to do that is through improving the efficiency of how they operate.

And this is this is what you consult on. Right. So when you go and talk to clients, you know, you have some some legal firms that are clients of yours as well. This is the stuff that you talk to them about. Right. Defining that process and how they can improve that.

Yes, so this is a huge piece of what I do.

And I guess one of the parts is the difference. I’m sort of happy to be on the ground and mapping that out and looking at some very basic levels so that when they come to somebody like you to say, hey, this is our process, we want to automate. They’ve actually got some some building blocks there to work on, you know, starting from complete scratch.

The one piece that I do before that in terms of because how to define your process is driven by where you want your business to go. So if you don’t have a very clear idea on this is the size of my business that I want. This is the type of work if you stick with the law firm, for example, these are the areas that we’re gonna practice. And this is roughly how many staff I think we’d have. This is a capacity that we have now. This what we’d like to build the capacity to. This is a financial performance. This is a geographical range. If you don’t have some sort of just one or one doesn’t have to be.

Large in terms of a lot, but it does have to be clear, if you don’t have a clear direction on what you’re aiming for. You can’t build a process that supports it because you don’t know. Should you go big? Should do go small, do all of those forks in the road and the decisions that you have to make along the way. You can’t make them because you’re not 100 percent on what you’re trying to do. So it’s the point of planning then process, then people and they all sort of work in together at that point to make profit, of course, at the end of the day.

It’s like that’s what. And profit comes know for all of the. It can be seen as such a dirty word. I call you. You just capitalize and just trying to make my you’re like, well, everybody needs to make money. That’s the reality of this. Right.

Like, there is a massive difference between being profitable and being greedy. Yeah. And, you know, I’m in no way endorsing that. People should be just all about profit. But I tell you what, for all of the positive impact that you want to make in the world. Try doing it in a business that doesn’t make any profit.

Yeah, it’s a challenging thing to do. It’s a challenging thing to do. So thanks for thanks for describing that and applying that out.

And I suppose that comes back to back to the question that you asked me about, you know, going digital and process and and following that bouncing ball. And like you’ve said, it’s it’s really important to define process. So, you know, we want things to so obviously go digital.

So does the plan or the way that we would look at it is defined process, digitized process and then automatic steps in the process. So once the process is defined and once it’s been digitized, it’s really easy to be able to automate steps or functions within that process to achieve better client outcomes. And by doing that, you gain better efficiency. You provide a better quality of service to your customers. You’re doing more transactions. More transactions equals more money, equals more profit. Right. So it just relates directly back to what you do and the types of service that you provide. It’s really the first step or the first pace that somebody needs to do is clear a different definition of their processes. What they do and what they want their outcome to be.

So they know where to focus and what to change first.

But talk me through. Oh, I love the way that you’ve described that in terms of define the process, digitize the process and then automate steps within the process, because automating 50 percent of the process is obviously better than 10 to 10 of the process. So for for a business who is doing well? And when I say a business who is doing well, they’ve got a defined process. They’ve digitized some of the process. Thirty three. You know, you’ve got a whole spectrum of software that that could be potentially using for that. Let’s say that they define their process and they’re digitized bits and pieces of it. How where do they go? Because one of the things that I’ve seen is people go down the rabbit hole. They’ve got a software that looks after this little piece of the process. And that might be timesheets. And then they’ve got a software, the. Looks after this space, which might be high tide and I’ve got to software, it looks off to something else. Wait. How do you help people navigate through that minefield to say, OK. This is this is the software stack? Does that come right back to having the right plan in place and knowing the whole process?

Yeah, definitely. You know, I’ve seen it time and time again where people will go, okay. I have a process. I’ve now I’ve now digitized that. It’s pretty clear. And what I want to do is I have a problem in one bit of the process or one function of the process. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to find a single function solution to address that one bit. And then they do that. That’s right. And I get that a little bit of reward and I feel a bit better and the process is a little bit better. So it’s just that sort of constant improvement. Then I go and get another app to fix another bin and another app to fix another bit. And I go through this and I go through this process and then they end up with 20 apps that don’t talk to one another, all purchased and procured by different departments of the business that do different functions. They end up with all of these bills. None of them talk to one another. And I got a guy. Well, it feels better than it did before. But now I have all this stuff that I need to manage. And like you say, it comes back to preparation and planning for this and going, okay. Well, I have a process. And what I need to be able to do is I need to digitize it, but I need to automate functions within the entire process. And that’s the thing about process, is the processes flow into all the processes into other departments of the business, you know.

So you might look at something in isolation in the department and then go, OK, well, we’ve got an automation pace for this.

But what about the department that then flows into guys like I want add another bit. So if you plan early, you can look at that and go, OK. Well, what I want to do is I want to look at an application that’s going to be able to automate functions within my pace of the process and somebody else’s pace of the process and some other departments pace of the process. And by consolidating all of that information back into a single system or a single application stack, we would call it, where things talk to one another. Mike’s life really, really simple because you can go in and Gakkai, I’ve automated this, but now using the same technology on my niece and I can automate this. So you want to get a basically a bill from one vendor in terms of training people on how to use it? You don’t have to train them on one thing. It’s great if you just go, OK. Here’s your log in. He’s reeducating. Go on. Don’t learn about how the application works. He’s the process. And you can go to another department. They’re all looking at the same thing. So that one source of truth is hugely powerful in a process because it gives transparency to that information and to that process at any point in time. So, yeah, I’m a I’m a big believer in Consolidated Information Stack. Don, go and get 50 different apps to do stuff when you can just get one on one application stack. You know, we push on Microsoft three six five a lot. It’s great because everything’s just in one location and it’s all integrated. So that makes in terms of processing and doing stuff, it makes it hugely efficient just in itself that it’s integrated, but it gives us the opportunity to automate functions of it across the entire stack as well.

I love that and the pace that I really think that I hope people take away from that is to start early. Somebody who who is in and maybe I don’t need to talk to anybody just yet.

Talk that the value that you get from talking to somebody like and I’m not an I.T. expert. Like, I can work out how the nuts and bolts work together. I’m good at helping people extract that information out of their head. But when it comes to which I taste or software stack, should they should they use it? A lot of that’s gonna be driven by what they’re trying to do with the business. And to have that conversation with somebody like you early in the piece before they grow, before they put 20 apps in, before there’s really no there’s no shame. There’s no downside in that. That’s that’s gonna potentially help them out a lot in the future because they know. Well, this is where we’re going to go. This is the year we’re going to automate the induction process first and automate the project management first and automate the invoicing, whatever that might be. That’s the best for them. They know that straight away from the start, there’s a there’s a plan there from the start made the pacer he touched on. Then I do want to talk about what are some of the opportunities for people to maintain a knowledge base in their business nowadays? Software is something that would have brought that. You know, once upon a time, you had a manual. It’s a folder. You come out, you plunk it on the desk, it’s all written in instructions. Now we can do things like screen record, we can video, we can do what exists in the spectrum of knowledge base and what are some cool things that people can be doing to maintain a knowledge base in their organization.

Yeah, I love the I love the old manual thing. Yeah, I remember. Once upon a Time was ironic. You could buy a computer and it came with a big pipe, a manual. Right. And you buy the computer to do everything electronically and come with the big pipe manually.

I write this. It’s a thousand. So we love those. We love those types of things. But yeah. So, you know, work, practice or work instruction used to come in in a pipe advice documents. So you’d have to go and find those and distribute those and people would have to late read them and remember them. Now that we have digital systems and digital systems are really accessible. So does it matter where you are or what you’re doing if you need to find a work instruction? So that might be a standard work practice or a standard operating procedure. Any of those types of documents defining those is really important because it gives you a baseline to work from. So coming back to what we were saying, what you were saying before about just having clearly defined processes in the businesses. Right. Being able to then document those and put them into a knowledge base where workers or employees or staff within your business can go and call on or draw down on that information at any point in time is invaluable. So you’re not looking for a manual, you don’t fumbling your way through. You can basically go and get access to those resources for us. We keep our knowledge base. So this is both our internal operations and our client facing knowledge base to fix technical issues. So they might have a technical problem. And I can log into our system and I can see our knowledge base. And this has some quick documents on do this through this, through this. And that might fix your issue. Or you can call us and our engineers will look at the same thing. Right, Doug? OK. We do this.

We do this. We do this. And it’s hugely powerful because it means that we don’t have to go through a really long winded exercise to onboard people and coach them and train them on a bazillion different functions of the business. We can just go, OK. Come in, learn where you can find the information. This is the knowledge base. Leverage that pre-existing information which we have clearly defined the controls the way our business operates. Use that and leverage that information to deliver the outcome. So that’s a hugely powerful tool in terms of where to store. Look, there’s a bazillion different places you can have. I think it’s what is easiest. What is most accessible and what’s most realistic, depending on the size of your business, the structure of your business. You know, we keep ours in our operations tool, which we use, which is specific for the auto industry. So it’s our ticketing system. That’s where all of our information is kept, because that makes sense to us. If I didn’t have a ticketing system, I would keep it in SharePoint being it again and three, six, five house. We would capable of that in SharePoint on Scribe because it’s a web application. So you can have it on your computer. You can browse it over the Internet from Nisqually. Any computer that you can authenticate from. You can have the app on your phone. So it makes it super, super accessible and you can secure it down as well. So people can only say contextually when they log in. What is relevant to them as well, so that they’re good tools and good systems to having good information to be able to draw down on.

I think.

And just not not as a question more so, just as a comment. I say that is the number one shift and and challenge for businesses in the future looking to grow into the future. Knowledge is not the problem. We have knowledge everywhere. It’s teaching your staff how to find knowledge and safe knowledge and encourage them not to just come to people for the answers, but come to systems for the answers, come to databases that you can effectively have a library in your share point of how to solve problems, which can be hugely beneficial in terms of creating. People can see it in a negative light in terms all. You don’t spend time with the stop. It’s the complete opposite of that. You want to empower your staff to do the job that you’ve employed them to do without having to, you know, draw on fifteen different people to make that happen. So I see that as one of the real challenges for people staying put out of their staff to where to find information, how to get it and and what to go forward to defend.

The independence and autonomy comes from that as well. So. So people like you say, I am empowered to do their all. And I love what he was saying about, you know, I don’t come to people when the information a, you know, you shouldn’t have to rely on people. And I think a classic example of this and I was talking to someone about it this morning, you get an inquiry, right? So a customer calls up and says, oh, hey, Rob, somebody your team was doing this morning, can you find out where it’s at? Right. So part of my role is in business development is obviously doing client account management. So they’ll ring me and ask a question. OK. Right. So what do I do? I just jump into our ticketing system. I can have full transparency. Right. I can see all of that. What if I couldn’t? What if I had to go and find my colleague and go all high because all of the information’s in your head and not in our system. I need to come and interrupt you from doing what you what you’re supposed to be doing so that I can answer a question for a client. Now, I’ve added a gap in answer. So now I have to pull it back because I can’t access information quickly. I’ve disrupted my colleague from doing what they need to be doing and efficiencies gained. Just the minute in that conversation. By eliminating that callback, I provide a better customer service. Just having access to the information. Don’t interrupt my colleague. Don’t interrupt my time having to chase that information up. It’s just there.

It’s just an. Yeah. Huge, huge. Is so many.

What I would call a tier one issue is that you can’t give the customer the response. And then there’s tier twos and tier threes and tier fours that, you know, flow on behind. And that same principle happens all the time.

So, yeah, great example. My curious is somebody is really sort of hot at the moment. Obviously, people are getting smarter and smarter. It’s great to have all of this information in one place. And we’re talking about, I say, our annual holding a lot of data. We stick with a law firm. A law firm is holding information about matters. The security of that is incredibly important. One of the things that I know just from talking about there’s an. A concern of all, if the information is in the cloud, it’s more accessible than if it’s on hard drives. Now, computer like on site. What can you give people as a bit of a one to one? What are you. Obviously, security, something that’s incredibly important and a primary focus at the start. How does that kind of happen? How do they make that happen to the ones like me who know nothing about that?

Yeah. So the first thing to realize is that the cloud is just essentially the same computer you have in somebody else’s cabinet. Right.

So you might have a server in the cabinet, in the in the office. All the cloud is. Is that Simões over in somebody else’s cabinet? Right. And you’re just given access to that. Now, there is a whole raft of hugely beneficial or right reasons why you should move to the cloud in terms of scalability, resources and all these other wonderful things. But I can tell you now that in terms of cloud infrastructure and securing cloud infrastructure and provisioning tenancies that the clients would use or consume and having your stuff there, the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other cloud providers are spending a lot more money on cyber security than you are. So that’s that’s just plain and simple. Number one, where there is gaps, though, you know, there’s always gaps. And if it sounds too good to be true, it normally is. So Microsoft and Google and Amazon, very much of this trying to sort of self-service and self provisioning. Right. So what I want to do is I want to make it as simple as possible for consumers or users of that infrastructure to be able to gain access to it. And the simply you make it, the less secure it can potentially be. Now, they all have built in mechanisms whereby logging in or authenticating against those services, you can secure those.

One of the biggest things that I push and I push it all the time, I push it often, I always talk about it is to factor will syndication. So in terms of the security and those cloud services being hacked, forget it. There is you know, everyone’s been been trying for a long time. I don’t think they’re going to get hacked. They’re just not. But diet may be penetrated by cyber criminals. Using your authentication to getting something basic that everybody should do is just turn on this second factor of authentication for all of their cloud services just to better protect it. So if somebody did get your password and tried to log in, what Two-Factor authentication does is you install one app on your phone or it might send you an estimate, but when you go to log in, it will say, hey, someone’s tried to log in just to confirm it’s you. Can you describe your mobile and just let me know that this is legitimate? As you got to log in, and that’s hugely powerful. So even if someone stole your password, hacked your password, whatever that happens, they turn that on and that will make that far more secure.

Somebody who keeps all of my life. Yeah. Big, big fan of the Google, too, if I is getting a fair run as an app.

Everything said to be a text message for this love. Your sister is here.

And, you know, occasionally clients give me access to their side of things like that. We need to be on the phone so you can tell us. But absolutely. It’s a it’s. It makes things like the end of the day. It’s peace of mind, isn’t it? It’s that’s what you want. You want peace of mind that right now things are secure. Good luck. I’ve got a slow Internet here today. I’m using mobile. I’m using my hotspot. It’s killing me. If I had half a dozen staff and our Internet is down, let alone our entire system has been hacked or we’ve been shut out. It causes massive issues.

Yeah. Yeah. Huge disruption. And when I have seen organizations that have been hacked before, there’s obviously a notifiable data breach. So they have to know that, notify the government that they’ve been breached. There’s the process of going through, working out or determining what’s been lost. What’s been stolen. Who to notify. How to best protect them. And throughout that entire process, is reputation gone. You know, everything that everything that you thought you had need worked so hard for for so long. Some random dude in Romania hacks into your system, steals your information, and that’s it.

That that reputation that you’ve built over the last 10, 20, 30 years is gone overnight because you have to report that you’ve been breached.

And, you know, it’s pretty embarrassing for you. And, you know, I suspect it doesn’t look real good on your on your résumé with your clients either. So, yeah, not a great spot to be.

Not exactly the selling point that clients are looking for. So not particularly over the evening Corona.

Things are a little bit quieter and maybe you’ve got a little bit more time on your hands. You know, we spend it doing that. Absolutely. Nobody wants to not only have the headache, but then have an additional pile of work be created. Everybody needs that.

So I think there’s a ton a ton of gold in that for people to look at.

One thing maybe to just finish on. What’s your what’s your podding piece of advice to somebody who’s thinking, hey, this space in there is room for improvement in how we operate from an I.T. point of view, whether that’s security, whether that’s, you know, automation and things. What’s your what’s your podding piece for them?

Yeah. This may come as a as a complete surprise to people, but in the context of technology and what you can do with technology and what’s important to you. I would start by not looking at the technology and look at your business first. So I think you touched on it earlier, right. About defining processes and all of those things. They all sound really warm and fuzzy. Right. Sounds bright. But now what you should be looking for in terms of an I’d say provider is an I’d say provider that can look at your business plan, which you’ve already defined and unequivocally say this is what you need to help you achieve your goals based on this business plan or distract plan that you’ve put together. So my advice to people would be define your business plan or define your strategic plan. Pull on resources that can help you do that. So, you know, I’m always happy to give you a plug here, Marty. This is what you do, right? You can help people define these things and put these strategic plans and these business plans into action. Do that first. Define some processes in your business. Define where you want to go. And then look at the ITC race sourcing that is required to deliver that. What I say is so broad. There’s just everything under the sun. Right. But there’s no point just buying stuff because someone recommended it. Right. It needs to be well aligned to where you want your business to go and what you need to do. So that would be my advice to people. Start with your business plan. Start with the stretched plan. Work out where you’re going and then draw down or call in the resources that you need to be able to facilitate that. When I won.

Good times, mate. Thank you. Appreciate the unintentional plug all. All seriousness there, but it. I thought you said if somebody comes to you, I can totally see how that makes your life easy. Somebody comes to you and says, hey, Rob, this is where we’re going. This is what we’re trying to do. This is where we’re at.

Now, how do we fill the blanks? You can help them very quickly, very fast. They’re looking at a much cheaper price. If somebody comes to you and says, hey, Rob, we’ve got some I.T. problems, can you help? We’ll start and learn a merry go round and reactive man get off reactive stuff.

That’s reactive stuff. And, you know, you fight through the reactive before you can start looking at proactive. Hundred percent agree.

Yeah. With with what you’re saying, just stop. It’s going to start with that plan and be proactive about it and work towards that.

Good times. Well, I appreciate you having me on. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for your your insights and your inputs and and your questions of. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. I always do. I always love our catch ups.

And I’m hoping that maybe some people will make some comments or shoot us some messages and we might read book this again, maybe do another session next month, see if people hit us with some questions, some things they’d like to know from a side of the fence. So might be relied too. I see. Or it might be related to the range of things you do around improving business and, you know, defining process, all of those lovely things and setting business plans and stret plans.

So if anyone has any questions, shoot them through to either Marty or myself. If we are not connected on any social platform, please connect with me, connect with Marty, get in touch and we’ll look forward to seeing you next on.

Geez, Rob, thanks for that. Thanks, Mike. Geez. By.