Workflow Solutions in Real Estate Mean Higher Profits

If you are in the Real Estate industry, you know how frustrating it can be to balance rental enquiries, maintenance orders and property inspections with the time needed to manage relationships with your clients.

In order to improve efficiency and reduce wasted time in your Real Estate agency, you need to streamline your business processes, and for this you will require an effective workflow solution.

Deploying a web-based workflow in your Real Estate agency means:

• You are able to streamline your operations;
• It’s easy to identify bottlenecks;
• You can find ways to save time and money;
• You are able to harness sales opportunities;
• It’s easy to control your property management processes;
• Your customer service improves;
• Your quality of work improves.

Setting task statuses are one of the most popular functions of web-based workflow software in your Real Estate office. Task statuses can be as simple as Draft, In Progress, Created, Completed and Cancelled. Premium workflow software allows you to customize task statuses according to your specific needs. Task statuses allow approved members of your organisation to view each process and its status at any stage.

Realtors who embrace online workflow software find that they have more time to devote to improved customer service, which improves their bottom-line. Employees communicate easily with each other and can provide consistent and current information to clients at all times.

Kontinuum online workflow software provides massive benefits when used by Real Estate agencies. See our website and discover ways to improve processes that save you time and money.

Are you confused between add-on and stand-alone workflow software?

Employees can get confused by workflow automation, particularly when workflow is combined with other software as an add-on.

Some software offers workflow functionality as an “extra” – and this is where confusion starts to creep in.

Add-on workflow is not the main function of most software. In fact, it is often a basic tool used to upsell the main software to unsuspecting business owners.

Standalone workflow software, on the other hand, is specifically designed to improve your processes and manage the vast amount of tasks your business needs to function efficiently.

Business Process Management (BPM) software’s main function is to connect people and systems by bridging the gaps between them. It’s not about replacing workers with machines, but rather to help make their jobs easier and more efficient.

Standalone workflow software offers a comprehensive way for businesses to do more with less. Software development companies with online workflow as their flagship product provide excellent training and support for employees, as well as offering specific expertise customised to your situation. Workflow software developers often provide a comprehensive workflow solution, which involves an analysis and customised review of your business.

When you deploy standalone workflow software with adequate training and support from the developers, employees understand the big-picture goals of BPM implementation. They understand how they, as employees, fit in with the organisation’s larger mission and are able to work towards a common objective with the rest of their peers.

By taking labour-intensive processes and automating them with online BPM software, organisations can become more capable, efficient and profitable.

Web and Flo’s flagship workflow software, Kontinuum, is successfully used across different industries throughout the world.

Six Sigma promotes hierarchy within an organisation, with employees earning titles such as Champions, Master Black Belts and Green Belts.

Six Sigma is simply an approach for achieving process excellence. The Six Sigma management strategy provides tools and techniques that identify how you can eliminate waste within your business.

Originally developed by Motorola in 1981, Six Sigma strives to improve processes by reducing variability in production methods.

Six Sigma promotes hierarchy within an organisation, with employees earning titles such as Champions, Master Black Belts and Green Belts. Every Six Sigma project follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified targets (usually financial).

As with lean manufacturing, Six Sigma can be applied to any businesses across all industries and of all sizes. However, small to medium businesses often report faster successes with Six Sigma, as the implementation time can be sped up due to less hierarchy and bureaucratic delays.

Six Sigma will help you recognise processes that currently exist, including suppliers, contributors, procedures, outputs and customers. Once these processes are identified, Six Sigma assists you with determining who owns specific processes and helps them find ways to improve these specific processes.

Six Sigma strives to:

1. Reduce process variation by consistently achieving stable and predictable results
2. Maintain process stability by measuring, analysing, improving and controlling processes
3. Maintain commitment from entire organisations, particularly from senior management
4. Encourage decision-making based on verifiable data, rather than assumptions

Six Sigma dramatically increases productivity because no time, energy or resource is wasted in any of the processing levels. It reduces costs and wastage and is easily adaptable to accommodate change. Organisations that embrace positive change survive global challenges.

Talk to Web and Flo about increasing your productivity and achieving process excellence on: 1300-859-894 (within Australia).

Watch your profits soar with lean manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy that helps businesses remove wastefulness.

With changing times, rapid technological advances and intensifying needs, businesses are facing efficiency and profitability challenges.  Adopting a lean manufacturing strategy will help businesses initiate solutions to these challenges.

For example, a simple reshuffling of layout within departments can ensure that the necessary processes feed directly into each other, maintaining efficient workflow, without wasting time and energy on interruptions between processes.

Implementing lean manufacturing drastically aids in the streamlining of operations and reduction of waste. It consistently focuses on the areas most noted for wasting time, energy and resources, namely transportation, waiting time, complaints, lost paperwork, overproduction, inventory and over processing.

The benefits of adopting a lean manufacturing strategy can be noted almost immediately.

Lean manufacturing:

• streamlines operations
• strengthens production processes
• reduces wasteful habits
• increases flexibility by improving layouts
• reduces floor space needs
• speeds up delivery times
• reduces bottlenecks

Lean manufacturing provides businesses with the tools to succeed in the increasingly competitive global market, which demands faster turnarounds, superior quality and lower prices. Embracing a lean manufacturing work ethic ensures that your workflow processes will improve and you will see astounding results almost immediately.

Web and Flo are leading Australian experts in improving processes. Their signature workflow management software, Kontinuum, is used by businesses of all sizes. Web and Flo offer a FULL process improvement solution, specifically tailored to your needs, including definition, documentation, design, build and deployment.

Melbourne, Australia: Web and Flo today announced the appointment of Trent Leyshan as Sales and Business Consultant.

Mr Leyshan joins Web and Flo to further enhance their drive for process improvement.

Web and Flo is committed to continuous process improvement and Mr Leyshan has been engaged to assist with the next phase of business expansion by streamlining sales processes, enhancing distribution channels and increasing market share.

Mr Leyshan brings a wealth of experience in enhancing sales and business processes gained from over 15 years of leading successful projects, teams and businesses within Australia.

Founder of BOOM! Sales and author of The Naked Salesman, Leyshan is highly specialised in the development of sales people, sales leaders, sales culture and team performance.

Web and Flo’s Commercial Director, Ms Anna Fogarty, said that Leyshan’s focus on process improvement and experience in sales makes him ideally suited to the sales and business role.

“Trent is successful at ensuring the optimum use of people to deliver solutions, as well as leading organisational change processes, both from within organisations and as a consultant. We’re delighted to have him on board.”

Ms Fogarty said that Web and Flo advise their clients to consistently evaluate and analyse their processes, in order to improve their bottom line.

“We are doing what we advise our clients to do. Web and Flo are constantly striving to improve our processes, and having Trent onboard will advance our already successful processes.”

Contact: Anna Fogarty, Commercial Director, Web and Flo. Tel: +61 3 8456 8997 Mobile: +61 405 131 557 (anytime)  anna.fogarty@webandflo.com, www.webandflo.com

About Web and Flo

Web and Flo provides innovative workflow software and business process management (BPM) consultancy to businesses in industries such as Banking and Financial Services, Manufacturing, Education and Government. Web and Flo’s Workflow Management software, Kontinuum, is internationally recognised and is designed with the human end-user in mind. It is easy to use and can be accessed anywhere in the world in real time, as it is a purely web-based software solution.

Web-based Workflow Software Saves Time

Universities are bogged down by forms, according to an article published in The Australian. Academics resent the time wasted on administration. For every PhD graduate, an academic has filled in 14 forms, supplied 270 pieces of separate information an average of 2.7 times. A conservative estimate places the time an academic spends on filling out these forms at 580 minutes. That’s almost 10 hours per graduate – equating to funding 11 full-time PhD students or paying a professor for two years in just one faculty.

In 2001, Gartner released Rightsizing Output Fleets – The Hidden Gold Mine. This research paper identified total print costs (copying, printing and faxing) to be as much as 1-3% of an organization’s revenue. However, the real strategic value lies in analysing the indirect costs such as the cost of document searches, IT support, lost paperwork and the cost of time spent filling in countless forms.

An online workflow can integrate all the necessary departments into one efficient software solution, streamlining processes and providing immediate feedback on procedures. The integration of paper into the digital workflow, if done properly, will produce a complete information solution combining both paper-based and digital-based documents.

These workflow solutions will ultimately increase operational efficiency, employee productivity and encourage compliance. Most of all, a web-based workflow solution would reduce the almost 10 hours of form-filling per PhD graduate, capturing the data only once and transferring it to the appropriate sources.

An online workflow management tool includes the following benefits:

• Fewer “lost” documents
• Faster, online access to information
• Consistent and accurate audit trails
• Increased operational efficiency
• Ability to identify bottlenecks
• Streamlining and automating of administrative processes
• Reduced delays by intelligent routing of forms to the right person at the right time

Ref: Clarke, P. & Graves, N., 2010, The Australian, January 20, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/in-most-forms-a-waste-of-time/story-e6frgcko-1225821367468  on 25 January 2010.

Philip Clarke is from the University of Sydney and Nicholas Graves is from the Queensland University of Technology.

Improve Efficiency in 2010

Oscar Wilde wrote: A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.

The origin of New Year’s resolutions dates back as far as the early Babylonians. They believed that a person’s actions on the first day of the New Year affected what they would do throughout the year.

Of the 45 percent of the population that make New Year’s resolutions, a whopping 75 percent of these are never fulfilled. If your New Year’s resolution is to improve your processes and become more efficient – don’t become one of the statistics! Get some help and just do it!

Web and Flo provide BPM solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our workflow management software, Kontinuum, can be easily customised to reflect your own branding.

May 2010 be a year of efficient processes

Best wishes from the team at Web and Flo

McDonald's workflow: Every second counts

McDonald’s and Workflow

Every second counts. Each delay, bottleneck and unnecessary step reduces output and highlights the need for efficient workflow processes. McDonald’s has embraced the importance of managing processes, by ensuring that every second is accounted for in the making of each product.

Service time is critical to McDonald’s success, as McDonald’s tries to increase customer satisfaction within the competitive fastfood industry. The plan to get food to customers quicker, and keep increasing the market share that McDonald’s won in the recession, means that each second really does matter.

As part of McDonald’s ever-increasing process development, the company is testing a self-serve kiosk in Europe, which may prove popular with diners seeking to customize meals and limit their time in queues. The downside may be the time needed to read the screens of choices.  McDonald’s Director of operations and POS technology, Laurie Gilbert, said that the system is easy to learn and may cut as much as 10 seconds off the current workflow.  Approximately 5,000 restaurants out of the company’s 32,000 locations are trialling the new software.

McDonald’s currently aims to serve most customers within 90 seconds of taking their order. In order to speed up times at drive-through windows, staff at the McDonald’s Innovation Centre spent years incorporating an automated soda fountain that fills cups as soon as an order is placed into the workflow. When this same crew discovered that hot drinks needed more milk, they added refrigerated storage below the McCafe coffee makers to speed up efficiency. These two improved services have led to the processing of as many as five extra cars per hour in the drive-through queue.

The Innovation Centre has also redesigned an assembly area with three sides for staff to pack food into bags, while a new preparation table that holds 50 percent more burgers and chicken breasts is shaping up to be more energy efficient. The new preparation table also lifts the bread steamer to hip level so that workers avoid bending over for every order.
Staff at the Innovation centre gather orders, productivity and performance data to ensure that tests mirror the real world as closely as possible, plus they track the food to see where bottlenecks are most likely to occur. Once these bottlenecks have been identified, issues are fixed and efficient and proven workflow procedures are put in place.

McDonald’s realises the key to creating customer satisfaction within their market niche: Fast service and fast food. Without detailed workflow processes, McDonald’s is unlikely to be able to maintain their position within the fastfood industry.

Snowy Hydro provides peak energy and renewable electricity to the National Electricity Market. The company’s operations occur in a diverse range of physical and regulatory environments, ranging from the alpine areas of New South Wales to the metropolitan areas of Melbourne.

To ensure that Snowy Hydro were fully compliant with necessary environmental legislation, the company needed a software solution that could provide its operations people with a streamlined, self-guided application that efficiently identified individual obligations.

Snowy Hydro’s Environment Manager, Mr Michael Griffiths, said that after reviewing a number of software solutions from a range of providers, Web and Flo’s Kontinuum software clearly outstripped its competitors.

“We selected Web and Flo as our workflow solution provider as they offered a user friendly software solution with the appropriate workflow functionality and logic, good value for money, and demonstrated overall the technical expertise and business understanding,” Mr Griffiths said.

“Kontinuum is highly flexible, allowing the workflow to be easily modified according to any new legislation.”

“I see Snowy Hydro and Web and Flo’s partnership, and Kontinuum, becoming an increasingly important part of our management software.”

Web and Flo’s Commercial Director, Ms Anna Fogarty, said that Kontinuum is ideal for organisations like Snowy Hydro that need smart dynamic logic to manage user responses and direct to them to the appropriate next steps.

Kontinuum customises each process and has streamlined Snowy Hydro’s environmental compliance,” Ms Fogarty said.

“We are delighted to be working with Snowy Hydro and we look forward to a productive and long term relationship with them.”

Contact: Anna Fogarty, Commercial Director, Web and Flo. Tel: +61 3 8456 8997; Mobile: +61 405 131 557 (anytime); www.webandflo.com

Web and Flo provides innovative workflow software and business process management (BPM) consultancy to businesses in industries such as Banking and Financial Services, Manufacturing, Education and Government. Web and Flo’s Workflow Management software, Kontinuum, is internationally recognised and is designed with the human end-user in mind. It is easy to use and can be accessed anywhere in the world in real time, as it is a purely web-based software solution.