In the earlier articles, the simple concepts of simplify, uniformity, consistency, standardizing and automating have been advocated and practical illustrations  given to demonstrate the benefits of practicing them.

In today’s article I would like to look at a simple automation deploying the shared service folder.

Assuming we have the following scenario:

• a holding company with many overseas subsidiaries

• every month, the group treasurer will thro e-mail disseminate the foreign exchanges  rates to the various subsidiaries,

• every month, the overseas accountants will e-mail chunk of reports to the holding company, group financial controller

• after receiving the monthly report, the head office personnel will start printing out the report to forward to top management for review.

• produce certain management reports like charts, trends, etc for top management

You will imagine that a lot of manual and tedious work will be performed to get all the above running.

So, what do you think we should do to simplify and slightly automate the workflow process:

We can:

1. discuss with the MIS or IT section that we would want to create a shared serviced folder,

2. create a shortcut icon in the relevant users’ ( top management, etc)  personal computers to link to this shared service folder

3.  in this shared service folder, we can then further create:

• a partition particularly for the Foreign Exchange Rate for the use of the overseas accountants, etc. This will then become a monthly gazette.
• another partition for in each country to put in all their monthly reports ( this can be converted in adobe pdf file if need be.) ,etc
• another partition for special reports

The above is not talking about creating high tech software but simple networking mean which has sufficient firewalls not to jeopardize the company’s security..

By doing so:

• we do not need to print the hard copies,
• information like foreign exchange rate set by the head office treasurer and others can be dessiminate to and fro head office to overseas subsidiaries or vice versa.,
• the overseas accountants can also input and then download or upload the necessary reports whether monthly or adhoc
  

Also, please review my  earlier article on naming of file and standardization of file names so as to complement the use of this shared service folder.

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