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Fitting the Pieces Together: A Guide to Office Operations for the Liquid Waste, Portable Toilet & Septic Pumping Industries |
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When does your business need more then one PC? Let’s look at several different business situations that might require multiple PCs and assign a dollar-per-hour to the cost of the second PC. This will allow you to compare, in terms of dollars, if a second PC is a benefit or an expense for your business. We will look at several common business situations and how a second PC might work in your business.
There are generally five circumstances when multiple PCs are a good idea.
Multiple People In An Office
Business and Home Office
Special Computer Intensive Applications
Special Security Requirements
Computer on the road
When you have multiple people working in the office, a good rule of thumb is that each permanent office person should have a PC. This allows everyone to answer the phone and respond to customer questions, AT THEIR DESK. Different people using the same PC can lead to operational problems, just as when a truck has multiple drivers, it is difficult to get someone to take responsibility for the truck. PCs are no different. Each person can change colors, position of icons and the responsiveness of the PC that would affect someone else’s ability to use the PC and the level of their productivity. In general, shared PCs do not work well. Yes, the "P" in PC stands for "Personal".
As usual with any business decision, you understand the people issues and then you need to do a back of the envelope business case to see how much it will cost you to minimize the people issues without going broke. Let’s look at a what it takes to put a PC on every desk.
A best buy PC costs $1600 plus $200.00 for a printer for a total of $1800.00, not counting tax and shipping. PCs have an effective life of three years, after this time the replacement cost, new capabilities and mean time to failure makes it a good idea to replace the unit. Each PC costs $600.00/year. A worker with two weeks vacation works 50 weeks for 40 hr./week or a total of 2000 hr. per year. Thus the PC cost, prorated as to useable time, is 30 cents per hour ($600/2000hr). Not very much money. If two people argued for one hour a week over computer availability, that works out to 100 hours at $20.00 per hour loaded salary or $2000.00 per year. If a second PC avoided this one hour of lost productivity, it actually saves $200 per year.
When you have a place of business and a home office, you may need a PC for both.
Some common situations that require this are:
Many times you need to do your paper work at night and you want to see your family.
Your significant other handles the invoicing, accounting, etc. and needs to work out of the home office due to sickness, child care or weather.
Certain work requires you to be away from the phone and daily activity so that you can concentrate without disturbances. Work such as special bids, business case development, etc. require significant concentration.
Investing $1800 in a second PC that should last 3 years is $600.00/year. If you use the PC for an average of 10 hours per week, this works out to ($600/50 week/10 hr./week) $1.20 /hr. for the second PC. Is it worth a $1.20/hr. to have the flexibility of a second PC?
When you do special work, i.e., graphics design, job estimating or Computer assisted Design (CAD) that ties up the computer while producing a drawing or calculation, it is hard to cancel a program or switch to a separate screen to be able to answer the phone and look up customer information. If this is the general rule, you may want to consider a dedicated PC for the engineering work. This allows the computer intensive work to continue un-interrupted and still allows you to be responsive to customer calls. Beyond the issue of minimizing interruptions, this type of work usually requires blocks of time, significant effort, concentration and lots of work space to handle all the papers associated with the work.
The need for a secure PC that handles work that you want to keep under limited access, such as:
Financial
Payroll
Personnel records
may require a PC in an area where someone cannot look over your shoulder, or you can leave the PC unattended to get a cup of coffee. This may require a separate unit. There are several options you have, if you have several PCs in a common area, to minimize unauthorized access to information. Some of these are:
Password in the motherboard of the PC
Polaroid filter to stop side view of screen and permit monitor view only from straight on.
Screen saver set to 30 second delay before it cuts in with password.
Shredder for the printer output.
The business issue here is the entry of sales activity in the field in an electric media so that re-entry is not required when you return to the office or if your office is in the cab of your truck. Almost all attempts to run your office out of the truck usually put you at cross purposes with what your are supposed to be doing, i.e., driving, pumping tanks and working with your customers. It is very hard to beat the efficiency or speed of a clip board and a pencil for recording sales in the field. When you return to the office, with no operational distractions, you should be able to enter the daily activity in less then 30 minutes and you have options to:
Reflect on how the day could have been handled more efficiently;
Hire a part time clerk to enter the data the next morning;
Use lower cost PCs or Laptops (laptops tend to cost 2-3 times the cost of an equivalent PC);
There are successful applications of PCs on the road. Some examples are:
Delivery companies have devices for driver entry that, via cellular connection, transfer the information back to the central office from the truck during the working day. This gives the delivery company a level of service over their competition, e.g., the location of your package.
Trucking companies use satellite tracking systems to monitor the progress and location of trucks. This reduces theft and allows them to re-route trucks to minimize travel time without loads.
Universal Product Code (UPC) scanners track by serial code each stop by requiring the driver to physically scan each unit. The cost benefit of this technology usually cuts in between 2500 to 3000 units, i.e., the cost of equipment, office resources, training and cost of keeping units properly labeled exceeds the cost of reasonable management and clerical activities to obtain the same business objectives.
Sales people track daily customer contact, expenses and future schedule with a laptop and contact management software, e.g.., ACT™ II. This is an excellent application in that sales people do not have regular schedules and good sales people tend to be terrible at any clerical effort. Having a PC can minimize the time for entry of sales data and daily activity.
The common thread among these applications is that a large number of items are being tracked or/and very expensive items are needed to justify the large initial capital cost and ongoing management expense required to receive a dollar benefit.
As you can see, a second PC is not an overwhelming expense and can relieve your daily work of a great deal of aggravation and stress. Another, hidden benefit (and maybe the most important!) is that, if one of the PCs fails to work, the second unit is available to pick up the load.