Fixed Versus Flexible Working Hours in Workforce Management

Flexible working hours have been found to lead to a happier workforce, and to far better customer service and share valuations. However, there is a fear that implementing flexible working hours is complicated and that it could lead to a flood of impossible demands from employees.

Before we look at flexible working hours in more detail, let us take a brief look at the standard working hours.

Working Hours for Employees

Working hours for employees have changed dramatically over the last two centuries. Back in the nineteenth century when industrialization started in Europe, workers were compelled to work even 16 hours a day. In twenty-first century France, however, the government had fixed working hours at 35 hours a week.

Most industrialized countries have regulated the workweek by stipulating the maximum number of working hours per week, minimum daily rest periods, annual holidays and sickness pay. The standard is around 40 working hours per workweek, typically Monday through Friday. Paid vacations range from three to five weeks a year.

Long working hours can lead to stress-related health problems, less time for busy parents to attend to child-rearing, and less leisure to enjoy consumer products and services. Henry Ford introduced low working hours so that his employees would have the leisure to buy and enjoy the cars he produced.

Flexible Working Hours and its Impact

One major problem with fixed working hours is that employees find it difficult to balance the demands of their personal lives and work lives. Flexible working hours can lead to better work/life balance and result in a happier workforce.

Flexible working hours can come in different forms such as:

Part-time working that enables an employee to be free during business hours to attend to personal matters. For employers, it could mean engaging employees during peak workload hours, and reducing overall payroll costs
Flexi-time working where employees work extra time when needed by employers and bank the extra hours/days off for arranging their personal commitments
Annualized hours is an arrangement where times worked and times off are balanced across the year as a whole. Extra hours are worked during peak business seasons and less during lean seasons. Employers can retain experienced employees instead of hiring inexperienced casual or contract staff
Customized flexible working hours during special events to enable employees watch, say, world cup matches and yet meet their work time requirements


Studies have indicated that flexible working hours produce tangible benefits to employers in the forms of:

Reduced absenteeism and employee turnover
Lower recruitment costs as they can retain their existing staff
Higher staff morale leading to better work performance, customer service and even company stock performance


A survey even revealed that employees preferred flexible working hours to substantial additional pay.

Implementing Flexible Working Hours

Employers must know when they have peak workloads, needing more employees. This is not too difficult to assess with today's technologies like EPOS and computerized systems that can record transaction times.

Once the requirements are identified, flexible rostering software can generate rosters to fit the workload. This software would then help to optimize the rosters to meet:

Work contract requirements
Sociability factors, and
Employee work preferences to the extent possible

Where employee preferences cannot be met in full, the software would show the employees why this happened. This creates greater trust in the employees that their needs are being genuinely attended to.

Conclusion

The standard practice so far has been fixed working hours arranged in different shifts. This can lead of difficulties in balancing employees' personal and work life demands. Flexible working hours help better work/life balance and lead to a happier workforce. A happier workforce results in less absenteeism, better customer service and higher stock performance.

Finding The Right Expense Management Solution For Your Company

In recent times, initiatives such as the Sarbannes Oxley Act in the US have dramatically raised the profile of compliance within the corporate world. As a key element of any corporate compliance policy, expense management has shared some of the limelight. As a result, an Expense Management Solution (EMS) is now critical to any business concerned with corporate compliance. But what is an Expense Management Solution (EMS)? Does your company need one? And where do you find a good one? Just as importantly, how do you successfully implement and integrate an Expense Management Solution (EMS) into your corporate environment. This article sheds some light on these issues.

What is an Expense Management Solution (EMS)?

The term “expense management solution” has been used to describe quite different commercial products and services. In the context of this article, an expense management solution is defined as a technology based system that processes:

(i) transaction records received from a credit card issuer (detailing employee use of corporate credit cards0; and

(ii) cash reimbursement claims originated by an employee.

In practice the target application is Travel and Entertainment expenditure. A robust Expense Management Solution (EMS) will also support procurement (pCard) activities as part of a broader strategy of effectively managing lower value, high volume business-to-business transactions.

The three core steps of any expense management process are:

1. the acceptance/input of validated source data;
2. the application of predetermined rules of handling expense records; and
3. the posting of transactions to a corporate repository such as an ERP system.

What is the purpose of an Expense Management Solution (EMS)?

The objectives of an expense management solution implementation should include the following:

1. to automate the preparation, submission, approval, and auditing of travel & entertainment claims, thus improving the productivity of account holders and reducing the time and cost of accounts staff;

2. to support the implementation of a standardized best practice method of managing high volume expenses through the use of corporate credit cards; and

3. to increase the transparency and enhance the governance of financial transactions conducted on behalf of the enterprise.

Sources of Expense Management Solutions

Australian and international organizations now have access to a range of quality expense management solutions which are well suited to driving down administration cost whilst meeting corporate compliance requirements. There are essentially three sources of “expense management solutions”:

1. ERP systems;
2. systems offered by card issuers; and
3. best-of-breed solutions.

Each will have their own merits and will suit organizations in different circumstances.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems

ERP sourced expense management has the attraction of being fully integrated within the financial suite of software, therefore offering a standard look and feel to all users of the ERP. With ERP sourced expense management functionality, the ERP supplies the core software, and the enterprise needs to customize and configure the system to reflect its own structures and rules regarding the management of staff expenses. If you're considering the option of using their ERP for expense management, you need to be conscious of a number of factors, including:

• the actual functionality available within their specific installed ERP system;
• the backlog of work on the ERP system accumulated for the IT department; and
• the deployment time and the cost of the project (which will usually be substantial).
License costs can be an issue if an enterprise if your company has not paid a license fee that will cover all card account holders and cash claimants.

Card Issuer Systems

Some card issuers promote “expense management” solutions which can range from a computer generated report through to an online system with some embedded workflow concepts. The attraction of card issuer expense management solutions is that they are offered as part of a card deal, sometimes (apparently) for free. If you're considering a card issuer expense management solution, you need to know:

• will you be 'locked in' to the card issuer?; and
• will you be able to configure the expense management solution to adequately reflect internal requirements?

Best-of-Breed Solutions

Best-of-breed expense management solutions from specialist providers can be relatively seamlessly interfaced to an organization's internal systems such as HR and ERP, but will not present a common look and feel to the ERP system. You would usually choose a best-of-breed expense management solution if you want:

1. your company to be independent of a particular card issuer;
2. to achieve a fast implementation; and/or
3. to configure the solution to its own unique rules and policies of expense administration.

Best-of-breed expense management solutions are typically deployed as either an ASP (Application Service Provider) or self hosted solution. Although exceptions are common, small to medium enterprises tend to appreciate the lower up-front cost of an ASP expense management solution, and larger enterprises are attracted to the control available through a self-hosted expense management solution. ASP expense management solutions are typically paid for on a per statement per month basis, and self-hosted expense management solutions have a range of options available from up-front license fees to monthly license rentals.

Overcoming the Cultural Resistance to Expense Management Solutions

Some Finance Directors still have an aversion to corporate credit cards. It's not uncommon to hear a finance director say “if I give everyone a card, they'll spend us broke!”

However, the benefits of an Expense Management Solution are apparent as soon as the Finance Director considers the difficulties of controlling the expenditure behavior of thousands of employees using a manual system of reimbursements which is largely based around a set of uncoordinated spreadsheets. Basic activities such as enforcing travel policies, calculating tax implications, reconciling, posting to a chart of accounts at a detailed level and auditing, are so difficult as to be more honored in the breach than the observance...

Viewed from a different perspective, a company with revenues of $700m $50m in EBITDA, and $20m in annual employee business expenses, can make a dramatic impact on its bottom line using an expense management solution without increasing revenue. If automation reduces these expenses by only five per cent in the first year, the savings alone have the same impact on the bottom line as $14m in new revenue. It isn’t surprising that the return on investment of an expense management project is often achieved within its first 12 months of operation.

Expense Management Solutions also play a vital role in Fraud Control. “Fraud” in this context takes many guises, not all of which are the sort that land perpetrators in court. Information taken from our own customer experience and from publications of the USA Association of Certified Fraud Examiners identify the top four categories of fraud:

1. Mischaracterized expenses
2. Overstated (exaggerated) payments
3. Fictitious expenses
4. Multiple reimbursements

Research in the USA has pointed to as much as 1% of company revenues being lost to employee expense mismanagement. Expense Management Systems will not, in their own right, eliminate this but they are a vital tool in creating an environment that drives down the level of mismanagement.

Conclusion

Over the past 18 months, our company has observed a change in motivation for expense management projects. Whereas formerly expense management solutions were an exercise solely in the reduction of administration costs, now governance is equally a driver to implement technology based controls around high volume expenditure. The Sarbannes Oxley (SOX) act in the USA has captured the attention of any enterprise active in the USA. However, inside or outside the USA, the senior executives must warrant that their company has implemented adequate financial controls that prevent fraud and give a true and correct record of the enterprise’s financial activities. As a result, the Corporate Travel Manager who pitches a proposal on expense management to the senior executive team currently finds a willing audience.

Finding A Document Management Solution - In-House vs. Hosted Solutions

Before we get started, some of you may be asking what is document management?

Document Management is the ability to manage all of your paper documents in an electronic format. Let's define "paper documents in electronic format".

Basically, there are two types of document management systems, either an in-house solution, or an outsourced hosted solution.

So,which one will best suit your needs? Good question. Most companies base their decision on available staff to maintain these systems, and the technical abilities of those staff members. Cost of a solution is also a deciding factor. While the cost of an in-house solution is higher up front, having the technical staff to support it, it typically pays off in the long run due to the calculated Return On Investment (ROI). The lower cost of a hosted solution is appealing to many companies because this solution puts the technical responsibilities on the solution provider. It's also beneficial in that most of these solutions are web-based. While some companies can truly benefit from the hosted solution, many can't due to confidentiality of the information contained within their organization.

Finding a solution to fit your company's needs can be a time consuming venture. We recommend you first determine what solution fits your organization best, then shop for a solution with the features best suited to your business needs.

How much office space can I save? Good question. It depends on the amount of paper files you have taking up your valuable office space.

In most offices, there are filing cabinets everywhere. We've become attached and dependant on our paper files. Since most companies are mandated to hold their records from 3 to 7 years, that adds up to an exhaustive amount of paper needed to be maintained and stored. Where do you store it? In your office? A records storage company? What are those costs? All these questions lead this topic in a new direction. Why are you keeping these records in paper format? Why not an electronic format?

OK, let's look at some statistics. But before we do that, let's set the standard office environment so we have a reference point to start from. Now for the breakdown:

A typical filing cabinet drawer holds about 3000 pages when full.
So a full 4 drawer cabinet holds about 12000 pages.

A lateral file drawer holds about twice or 50% more files.
So a full 2 drawer lateral cabinet holds about 12000 pages.

The Simple Math

Ok, now that we know what we have in the space of our filing cabinets, let's look at space on storage media.

A standard 8 1/2 x 11 page scanned at 200x200 DPI (dots per inch) is about 50k in size (average)
There is 1024k in 1 megabyte of space.
There are 700 megabytes of space on a CD.
There are 4,700 megabytes of space on a DVD.

Ok, here's the simple math.

1,024k (1 megabyte) divided by 50k (standard scanned document) = 20.48 documents per megabyte
700 megabytes (1 CD) x 20 (scanned images per megabyte) = 14,000 documents per CD
4,700 megabytes (1 DVD) x 20 (scanned images per megabyte) = 94,000 documents per DVD

So here are the facts.

1 CD = 1 filing cabinet full of paper documents (12,000 documents)
1 DVD = 7 filing cabinets full of paper documents (84,000 documents)

Once these documents are scanned and placed on a CD or DVD (write once only media) they become legal documents that can be archived and retrieved later in the event you would like to print, fax, or email them.

Extracting Real Benefits From Travel & Expense Management

For your company to truly reap the rewards of a structured corporate travel policy, it must focus on one thing above all else: compliance. Unfortunately, while the explosion in convenient Self Booking Tools gives you a lot more freedom of choice, it also makes compliance a great deal more challenging. Any technology that supports an increase in compliance to policy has merit; it will save your company money and bring back the benefits of corporate travel.

Today's diversity of choice in self booking tools makes compliance through denial of access a very difficult protocol to enforce. What you really need is a funnel through which 100% of your company's travel activity must pass. In the corporate world, the only viable funnel is the payment mechanism – getting paid is the ultimate leveler. If you use a corporate credit card as the payment mechanism, supported by an expense management solution, and suppliers who can report back to you a reasonable level of data, you stand a very good chance of supporting the compliance objective.

A compliance-friendly Expense Management Solution (EMS)
An expense management solution which processes card transactions (and possesses decent workflow) requires the traveler to personally justify all deviations from policy to their supervisor – on a transaction by transaction basis. Just as importantly, the warehoused individual transactions give the corporate travel manager the opportunity to conduct spend analysis and examine individual and aggregate behaviors.

You might argue that this is after the act, but it still encourages compliance. As per all card based procurement systems, if an employee consistently deviates from company policy, they may be penalized (e.g. card withdrawal, official warning, employment termination, etc.). The threat of negative repercussions acts as a deterrent to card misuse, thereby increasing the level of compliance.

The benefits of policy compliance

80% of the business case benefits of corporate travel will come from travel policy compliance. This requires:

• Sound policy and procedures;
• A comprehensive communication strategy;
• A gate through which all activity can be channeled (the card and the expense management solution); and
• Tools to monitor and measure compliance.

There will also be some peripheral benefits to be gained from an expense management solution in the pre-trip phase:

For instance:

• The traveler can use the work flow component of an expense management solution to create travel request and approval records rather than using something less structured like emails.

• Using the expense management solution, the traveler can create a “commitment” record at the time of booking for subsequent matching of the credit card transaction when it comes through.

• You can obtain a download of trip data from your TMC, and travelers can seek to match that against trip card transactions, thus reducing the quantity of manual entries required of the travel coordinator.

• The expense management solution provides travelers with a real-time log of commitments beyond what might be recorded in a personal diary.

How does it apply to your company?

In looking at the business case for this exercise, you do need to closely examine a number of factors to determine the benefits you will actually realize:

• There are no industry-wide standards, and the market tends to work as a series of isolated closed provider loops – your efficiencies will be greatest if can conduct your business entirely within one closed loop. It is up to you to determine if you can obtain maximum purchasing power in this environment.

• The importance you place on understanding the cumulative value of travel booked but not yet paid.

• The extent to which you can source the data you require from your travelers via a TMC data feed and, consequently, the keystroke savings you can achieve for those travelers.

• The productivity gains you will obtain for your travelers by virtue of them setting up trip details in your Expense Management Solution (EMS) at time of booking rather than at time of arrival of the card transaction.

The combination of Electronic Travel Management and Expense Management is an important subset of eProcurement, and it is subject to the same challenges facing all eProcurement initiatives over the past 10 years – industry standards, supplier participation, and a seamless marketplace. Until these elements are all in place, greatest advantage will be gained by companies that focus on the big picture of where they can achieve maximum purchasing value with reasonable purchasing productivity – usually based on being able to perform an analysis of spend patterns and behavior.

Employee Performance Management

Fixation of compensation or wage rates for different categories of employees in a company is an important task of management. The employees are not only concerned with the wages received but also concerned with the level wages received by same level of employees in similar organizations. Hence wage structure may be considered very important. The relative wage-rules must be fixed carefully, because they have implications for promotion, transfer, seniority and other important personnel matters.

Wage plan should possess certain fundamental characteristics if the long term interests of the worker, management and the consumer are to be served. The wage plan must be linked with the productivity of the workers. Unless higher pay scales of workers are linked in some way to the productivity of workers, a wage plan will not be fair either to the management or to the consumers.

Basic wage for each job classification should be related to skill job requirements of job. Due consideration should be given to such factors as skill, length of time required in learning, versatility required and working conditions. In all fairness to management, the plan should usually result in a reduction of unit cost of manufacture, making possible lower prices and higher profits.

In all fairness to the consumers a share of higher efficiency should be passed on to them by way of lower price. This will be possible when there is reduction in cost due to higher efficiency. Thus the wage plan must ensure that all participate share the gains of higher productivity. The wage plan should include an incentive system for the efficient workers. The system should ensure higher pay to the workers who perform work at higher level of efficiency. The wage plan should guarantee minimum wage to protect the interest of workers against conditions over which they have no control.

Effective List Management Can Save You Big

Let’s talk about how to keep your postage costs down.

So far you have been following my advice and mailing to the same list more
than once. At some point you find lists that will produce returns continually, but you notice that you are receiving more returns than when you started mailing to those lists.

You may see things like "Undeliverable as Addressed" or "Forwarding Order Expired." Every time you mail to an address and that prospect has moved or cannot be found for any reason, you have just paid for the postage with no possibility of getting a response.

Obviously it is a pretty big waste of money to continue to mail to this address, but what do you do about it? You could simply go into the list of names that you have purchased and delete the returns. No more bad addresses, no more wasted postage, right? That is one option but there is a better way to handle the situation.

The US Postal Service has an NCOA (National Change of Address) System that a limited number of companies are licensed to access. These companies are able to take the list that you have purchased, or compiled yourself, and check it against the USPS system. You will receive a report that will let you know if anyone on your list has moved, gone out of business, or even if the zip code that contact was in was changed by the Post Office itself. Along with the report you will receive a new copy of your list that has been cleaned and updated.

The cost for having your list checked is very economical (about $5.00 per thousand records) and will allow you to keep getting your message out to as many people in your list as possible.

At times you can see up to a 10% undeliverable rate, and it can even be higher on older lists that you have been using for a while. Average is more like 5% undeliverable so let’s take a look at the numbers at that rate.

If you mail 10,000 and get 5% back for bad addresses: 10,000 x .05 = 500 pieces.

You will have paid postage on 500 pieces that did not reach their destination.

So if you mail to your list again without cleaning it you have just wasted: 500 x $0.23 = $115.00.

If you were to NCOA that list at a rate of $5.00 per thousand you would have spent: 10 x $5.00 = $50.00.

So you have three choices when faced with a list that needs cleaning:

1. Spend hours deleting every return that you receive from your list.

2. Waste $115.00 or more in postage every time you mail to that list.

or

3. Have the list checked by an NCOA service and get back in touch with customers that may have moved, for around one tenth the cost.

The NCOA service is the easiest and most effective way to keep your postage costs down.

Effective Data Management

Mining data is one of the keys to running an effective business. Here’s a primer on effectively managing your business data to maximize the efficiency of your business.

Effective data management plays an essential role for any growing business. Information technology has generated advanced tools for analyzing and managing data. Use of these tools can improve the performance of almost any operation. Steps made in capturing mass data electronically have developed the need for effective management strategies. Getting more and more data and transforming it into usable information is a major concern of today’s services and industries.

New technologies require new expertise, internal procedures and decision-making methods. Earlier companies were creating electronic databases, which were non-relational and difficult to use. Now with the use of highly sophisticated software and high-speed computers, businesses are reaping huge benefits from the computer/information revolution. Businesses are continuously making steps in managing data by using various tools to optimize information for sorting, searching and presentation in meaningful formats.

Many software programs and database applications are available on the market that enable companies to manipulate data in real time, capture knowledge for future use, ease the progress of operations to save time and costs and also to coordinate operations with partners.

The amount of data storage necessary and the duration it is kept online is growing swiftly, yet resources to manage data are limited. Data storage is a test to those companies wishing to maximize the value of their available data and also a huge task for storage professionals to manage and protect this data. Enterprises are struggling to bring together highly reliable platforms that can recognize where data is located in a company and whether it is utilized efficiently. Data management solutions must track, monitor and be vigilant of the conditions of your company data. It should also manage and distribute data efficiently. It should unify and simplify the administration of storage infrastructure.

Data is growing exponentially. Companies need maximum scalability, performance and production for data rigorous applications. They also need an easy to use, backup tool that provides transparency to where and how data and storage is utilized. Before choosing such and important process as data management, be sure to research your options and go with a solution that is flexible and scalable.