Thinking Innovatively on Successful Management to Create Efficient Cross-strait Team!
Denny states frankly that since their team is split up into different locations, a great deal of thought must be put into managing both sides as a whole. Previously, only Outlook was used to manage internal documents, reports and sales files, but Outlook can only assign tasks in a top down direction, and leaves no room for internal communications or input from other members of the team. And following the growth of the company, the number of employees on each side of the straits also increased. Outlook was no longer enough, the company now needed an effective and systematic management tool to improve both vertical and horizontal communication within the company, and also effectively track the progress of each task.
Denny states frankly that since their team is split up into different locations, a great deal of thought must be put into managing both sides as a whole. Previously, only Outlook was used to manage internal documents, reports and sales files, but Outlook can only assign tasks in a top down direction, and leaves no room for internal communications or input from other members of the team. And following the growth of the company, the number of employees on each side of the straits also increased. Outlook was no longer enough, the company now needed an effective and systematic management tool to improve both vertical and horizontal communication within the company, and also effectively track the progress of each task.
Denny states frankly that since their team is split up into different locations, a great deal of thought must be put into managing both sides as a whole. Previously, only Outlook was used to manage internal documents, reports and sales files, but Outlook can only assign tasks in a top down direction, and leaves no room for internal communications or input from other members of the team. And following the growth of the company, the number of employees on each side of the straits also increased. Outlook was no longer enough, the company now needed an effective and systematic management tool to improve both vertical and horizontal communication within the company, and also effectively track the progress of each task.
Due to the company need for additional help in managing the growing business, Denny began surveying the market for a suitable solution. A month after trying out Vis-a-Vis Report Management Service, he decided to become a long-term user. Thinking back to when Vis-a-Vis was first being implemented, although it was an immediate upgrade in software, having the staff change previously existing habits and adopt new work processes was still an issue to overcome. But after a six month period of use, the system was successfully implemented into a part of our standard work processes. Now when holding internal meetings, everyone attending uses Vis-a-Vis to share the content and progress of their work with each other.
Regarding Vis-a-Vis, Denny further explains that its "importance indicator " feature, and the flexibility of being able to set label the indicators with customized titles (e.g. job type, employee responsible, progress, and pending) allow the key points of reports to be seen immediately and meets the needs of the company's internal work process. Using Vis-a-Vis, not only can managers understand an employee's work progress, employees can also use Vis-a-Vis to manage their own work. This sort of dual-direction management mechanism has directly enhanced the work efficiency of the whole company! Denny uses the sales and engineering departments as an example to describe how Vis-a-Vis is actually used:1. The Sales Department: Our salespeople can utilize Vis-a-Vis to track the progress of cases and record any details about or discussed with clients. If one of our salespersons have any important matters that they need to assign, they can use Vis-a-Vis to forward the report to the relevant people.
2. The Engineering Department: Vis-a-Vis can clearly list all maintenance records and output after-sales service reports according to the date or area to be used as formal documentation of after-sales service records.
Implementing Vis-a-Vis helped improve the original problems with using Outlook where communication could only occur in a single-direction and input from multiple parties was no supported. This allowed for the readjusting of our working processes in a way that helped reduce the workload of all team members while also allowing for the quick viewing and grasping of key points and work progress.
"Still," Denny seemed compelled to add, "Previously our management team had to spend a ridiculously amount of time keeping track of the company's overall operations. The fact that the operations of Mason Electronics are spread out over three different locations makes it even harder to manage and keep everyone on the same page. But since implementing Vis-a-Vis, we are now able to easily view and discuss cases together; getting a job done has become a collaborative process. The advantage of learning from and sharing with each other which Vis-a-Vis has made possible, is that our overall work productivity has increased two-fold
Finally, in discussing Mason Electronic’s satisfaction with the Vis-a-Vis team, while Denny greatly appreciates the technology and design aspects of the system, he is also greatly appreciative of the excellent support team behind Vis-a-Vis responsible for back-end maintenance for going above and beyond in their service. Overall, Denny strongly backs the use of Vis-a-Vis for any small-to-mid sized businesses as their after-sales service and task management system!
