Risk Management And Change - Using Those Special Pair Of Glasses To See The Big Picture

For most a special pair of glasses that draw the ability to see the big picture, Change buy settlement as our economy has made a change, companies will also be forced to change, better or worse. What do I mean better or worse? The fact is either companies grow or fail, there is not another choice change is the only real tangible realm of business.

Why change? The unique pair of glasses views the real concern student loan consolidators that sentence, "most wait till it's too late to make a move, downsizing, layoffs and bankruptcy then occur". The real dilemma here tends to be lack of orientation training, current culture concerns and lack of simplicity. Other factors include perception, dynamic stability, lack of emotionally charged management and complacency.

The time to bring in change is now before the credit crisis takes further hold, before DIO's* increase to higher levels and DSO's**increase and reduce current cash flows. So begin a program of change starting today, then the occurrences in the first lines in the last paragraph are under control.

You may ask, how do I begin to change when our organization is performing so well? Great question, but I would guess you currently do not have a Risk plan as that would be a great start. Having difficulty getting started your best course of action would be to hire a consultant. If you have a Risk plan great, take another look lump sum distribution it, but not in the manner that you originally wrote it.

Make it a point to review your Risk plan every time management meets. You may be surprised of the items you did not think of, that is where change begins. The more you review it the more risk you will mitigate. Next, after you review your current plan, I recommend Software for Governance, that way you have a reference to know what your additional risks are and can help compliance with other issues. Let's take a close look at Paxil of the other items to begin the change process.

Some additional tools to use to instill the change process are:

1. Review your orientation training, if you are not retaining employees for more than three years find out why. Are you training them for at least two months? If you are not performing either one perform a cost benefit survey of the savings you would have if you kept them for three years, you should find significant savings. Tennessee Lemon Laws detailed review and possile revision in the current program is advisable. Secondly, is your company instilled in a program of lifetime learning? Change requires that new Ideas, Processes and Programs are designed and revitalized, learning the latest technologies and trends should be vital in that realm.

2. Certainly, organizational culture should change especially if innovation and technology is the necessary trend in your industry. Companies first and foremost need to open up lines of communication, my advise would be to extend management meetings from upper management to groupthink, or brainstorming including additional lower level employees and allow more vital communication from the ground up starting to eliminate the current "Top Down" style of management". In that strategy carefully open up the lines of communication slowly, one useful way to start is making rounds and asking questions, you will be surprised what you will find out. Another way to instill a culture change is to eliminate e-mails one day per week organization wide and visit the person you need information from on that day, it builds relationships and creates camaraderie.

3. I just finished an engagement where I had to "understand" how to reconcile bank statements for the simple fact that the journal entries were performed inside the system not visible to the payroll account at all, instead of transferring the funds to the appropriate account and then having ADP draft the account the deposit side came from several locations and was difficult to decipher and was unproductive wasting several hours. Several other very complicated journal entries were involved in that engagement and time consuming to decipher costing the company unnecessary dollars.

that comes down to simplicity, keep reports, processes and e-mails simple to understand, make sure they are updated so if you bring in a temp or consultant or have a new hire processes and tasks are simple to understand. Remember time is of the essence, not being prepared for these situations costs hard payroll dollars and reduces productivity. Eliminate that one report, process, or e-mail that is unnecessary, these items cost your organization productivity. How? It takes focus off the way that productivity and creativity can be improved and puts it on an unneeded task that time could be better used to prepare for future growth.

Other factors included above I will discuss in later articles are perception, dynamic stability and lack of emotionally charged management and complacency. Think about it, these are all defenses against change, they choke innovation, limit productivity and waste valuable time that is better spent preparing for the future. Structure is an idea of the past, flexibility is the way of the future.

*DIO's= Days Inventory on Hand
*DSO's= Days sales outstanding

Carl Ashton is a Consultant / Interim CFO / Controller for Acsys Inc and a member of the Gerson Lehman group of Subject matter experts.