The constant, consistent search for perfection

Process documentation needs to include a few basic elements to be a useful management tool.

A great approach has the person who is responsible and accountable, the person who has the authority, be documented first and foremost. It’s not just having a nice flowchart with objects and arrows. You’ve got to know who is responsible for that, who can change it, and who is accountable to deliver on it.

Next, you have to define the deliverables. What is this process’s output? What do you want to come out of it? What is the time cycle of that process? How long is it going to take? How long should it take? What are you going to do to measure that? You have measurements. You’ve got to put metrics around every process and know your expectations for error rates, turnaround time cycles, number of units going through, cost, and many other different specific measurements.

Last but not least, there needs to be a way to address improvement. If you don’t have that process map and those numbers to look at on a monthly basis or weekly basis, you can’t take a good hard look at it and improve it. Whether you remove steps, change steps, add tools or try to make the process more efficient, you need to work toward improvement.

What do you get out of good process documentation? Enterprise risk management is overlooked in process. A good process is part of that, the key to building a sustainable operating and business model is to look at it holistically. You have to say to yourself, “I am managing the risk of the entire organization. What happens if I don’t do well at this basic task or if I am unable to sell more business?” You have to look at it in the totality what you are trying to do to your company.

It’s often overlooked, and in the HR services industry we find many people who just simply don’t have it, won’t invest in it or haven’t put a culture in place to say that process documentation is important or use it as a tool for all of our conversations about how to improve the business. It has to be a constant, consistent search for perfection. You have to make it part of the culture to pull out the process docs, look at them, talk about them, and look at the measurements. It has to be ingrained in the company.

Spend dollars on what is “more right” for your customers

Spending dollars on what’s “more right” for your business and your clients is a concept that you really have to get your head around. We often get impassioned about something and, as a result, really want to spend money to improve it. The problem is, if a client isn’t willing to pay more for whatever it is you’re willing to spend that money on, then you really have to question whether there’s a better use for that money. Is there profit there?

For example, while I was sitting right there in the seat you’re probably sitting in, we needed to spend more money to ensure uptime during open enrollment and it was going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If I had listened to my internal management team, we absolutely would have spent that money because it was a critical time for us and for our clients. A client will leave if they’re unhappy.

What happened is, I sent our field folks out to talk to the clients. We wanted to talk about contingency planning with them if this should occur even though we’re not expecting it. What we came back with was that our clients were happy with having a phone-in enrollment or a on-site enrollment should they come into a crunch time where we knew there was going to be possible responsiveness issues on the server. We looked at the costs of what that was going to be compared with the costs of upgrading our servers and it turned out we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars that way – all because we asked the right questions:
Do we need to be “more right”?
Do we need to be “more better”?

That is not good English, but it is a helpful concept for this idea.

You always want to link everything you’re going to spend to either additional revenues, retention of revenue or reduction of costs to serve, and you want to put a likelihood of the occurrence to that and then ping it against data and facts as often as possible. If you can’t do that, don’t improve it.

At Cognet, when we engage with the client and look at processes, etc., we always link the work we are doing to one of these things:
Are we helping improve revenue? It may be a new product or service.
Are we helping with retention? It may be a quality issue.
Are we just helping with the cost to serve? – Are we lowering it so you can spend dollars somewhere else.

And if we can’t link it to that thing, we don’t do the work. That’s how important it is to us; that’s how important it should be to you.

How does CogNet help HR services deliver client value?

Cognet delivers value in many ways. I think one of the biggest ways we do it is that my partners and I have personally walked in your shoes. For the last 20 years I have been an executive in the PEO space and the broader HR space in general. So I think our understanding – a keen understanding – of what you go through in a day helps tremendously. How we run the business, what we offer and how flexible we are to your needs are all qualities driven by that understanding.

In terms of Cognet specifically, we have a highly educated workforce that is very process driven. More importantly we do things the client’s way. That flexibility means not questioning you or making you fit into what we think the way you should be and that definitely is a plus for small business owners.

An example of that is we had a client who wanted us to do a data entry job where we were populating disparate systems, something many of you are probably familiar with. But what we noticed while we were doing that is that we were populating disparate systems off of different forms and the data was different on those forms. So we went into analyzing it for a little bit and then came up with a solution of how we could scrub the data before we actually input it. That actually solved the problem. It wasn’t a data entry problem at all. The problem was that the data going in was wrong. So even though at the end of the day on that one it was less work to Cognet on that particular function, we solved the root cause. We earned business from that client on many other processes and it was win-win for everybody.

Our value is that we understand the space, we are very flexible to what you need to do. In all cases we do it cheaper and in many cases we can do it better. So let us help you with that.

Truth: Manual Processes Destroy the Bottom Line

If you run a business, you likely have low-value, menial tasks that have to be completed. And they have to be done right. But if you’re already operating at 99 percent now, and that’s good enough for your customers, you’re going to be at 99 percent tomorrow no matter how hard you work at it.

But how do you get your key talent focused on big picture items like vision and strategy when they’re rolling out the payroll? Here’s why you must come up with another way:

Distraction. Your whole business is distracted. Everyone is caught up in completing low-value tasks, and no one’s eye is on the ball.

Cost. You’re paying premium prices for regular gas. The overhead you spend paying your employees for the four hours it takes to locate the missing budget line item, is simply too high.

Competition. This is the big one. While you’re operating at 99 percent efficiency internally, your competition is brainstorming the next big thing that your clients are going to want and will leave you for.

Taking those low-value tasks to an outsourcer is a no-brainer. Why? It not only frees up your star talent to focus on retaining and acquiring new customers, it offers contracted deliverables, set turnaround times and even error rates. These are standards you might already have in place internally, but because you’re dealing with employees and not a vendor, are largely unenforceable.

In this competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to focus on manual processes. Talk to Cognet and get focused on the future. Contact us at 1-888-800-3719 or sales@cognethro.com.

Deliver More Value to Your Customers

Everything You Need to Know About High-Value Services

Click on the player to hear Cognet Managing Partner, John Sansoucie, discuss everything you need to know about
high-value services.

Truth: Manual Processes Destroy the Bottom Line

If you run a business, you likely have low-value, menial tasks that have to be completed. And they have to be done right. But if you’re already operating at 99 percent now, and that’s good enough for your customers, you’re going to be at 99 percent tomorrow no matter how hard you work at it.

But how do you get your key talent focused on big picture items like vision and strategy when they’re rolling out the payroll? Here’s why you must come up with another way:

Distraction. Your whole business is distracted. Everyone is caught up in completing low-value tasks, and no one’s eye is on the ball.

Cost. You’re paying premium prices for regular gas. The overhead you spend paying your employees for the four hours it takes to locate the missing budget line item, is simply too high.

Competition. This is the big one. While you’re operating at 99 percent efficiency internally, your competition is brainstorming the next big thing that your clients are going to want and will leave you for.

Taking those low-value tasks to an outsourcer is a no-brainer. Why? It not only frees up your star talent to focus on retaining and acquiring new customers, it offers contracted deliverables, set turnaround times and even error rates. These are standards you might already have in place internally, but because you’re dealing with employees and not a vendor, are largely unenforceable.

In this competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to focus on manual processes. Talk to Cognet and get focused on the future. Contact us at 1-888-800-3719 or sales@cognethro.com.

Deliver More Value to Your Customers

Do you know a commodity when you see one?

The reality is that we are in the aggregation of a commodity, and our friends at ADP and Paychex got that train moving a long time ago. Today, no business in America believes that payroll is anything other than a bushel of corn to the HR Services space.
We have to align our industry with that of our customers. Sure, our customers want payroll to be perfect so that they don’t have to actually talk to their employees about their paycheck. That may have been a differentiator before, but now it is an expectation or requirement.

What do our customers value? If you accept that our customers expect, but don’t value, payroll being right or the carrier invoice getting paid then it must be something else. Things like:

Excellent customer service. So when they do call with a problem that needs to be solved, there is a sharp person on the other end of the phone that actually answers and solves the problem in one event.
Advice on real business matters like how the Heath Care Reform Act will impact my business.
New products and services to complement what they buy from you. They love one-stop shopping.
These are business people building their futures and busy people looking for real help and service with a smile for an attractive price.

Consider the flat screen TV for a moment. Did the price go down or up as customers accepted it as the standard? Can we invent 3-D HR? No!

Like it or not, our customers view our traditional product set no different than winter wheat, and they want it better, faster and cheaper. Why do you think QuickBooks bought a payroll company? People want options.

The path to differentiation is right there in front of you, and your clients are telling you what they want. Eventually someone else will provide it to them.

A BPO partner can allow you to take the same resources you have today and focus them on new products, increased customer service and more consultative interactions with paying customers.

You have to view your own service set in a parallel path with your consumer. If importing time sheets and preparing benefit reconciliation is not valued by your client then you should explore ways to lower the cost of that commoditized transaction and focus on being good at what they want.

Companies like ours can bring added process skills to the table (ISO 9001) to ensure that your quality is the same or better. We can bring hard-dollar cost savings to the table, right where your customers demand it and free up your best to be their best.

Come see us at www.cognethro.com and see the collaborative business model that we have built for you. We join both worlds, and the intersection is you.

Disruptive Technology doesn’t have to be expensive to work!

Our team, like you or yours, worked in very large companies and saw millions thrown around into ERP, Data Mart, CRM and about a dozen other acronyms.

Sure, you can buy Siebel from our friends at Oracle to run your sales and customer service divisions for a whole lot of cash, or you can consider Sugar CRM or ZoHo with a 30-day free trial and pay by the month with no IT department following behind.

Each choice comes with a different list of good and bad, but given the price point, the differences in good vs. bad list are shrinking. You can run your General Ledger on Intacct just as well and at considerably less expense than Lawson, if you can put aside the name brand for a moment.

Disruptive technology doesn’t have to be off the shelf, it can be developed to solve a problem you have in common with your competition but owned by you. You can make your processes disruptive and lower price, increase quality and wield it against your nemesis.

Cognet is a provider that can help you disrupt when you consider the following facts:

Our owners and operators have been in your business and have hands-on knowledge of the problems you are trying to solve.
We have a presence in the largest pool of technology talent in the world.
That means that we can apply our understanding of your problem to develop a custom software or technology solution that makes your service model disruptive. We know there are opportunities today in your processes that don’t have an “off-the-shelf” software solution.

Make yourself a disruptive force in your space today by combining process and tools that you won’t find on Google.