Share

Categories: Founder's Blog

Author

Sam Bayer

Share

…and time is all we’ve got…

As a company, Corevist has a very simple mission.   We’ve chosen to help Industrial Manufacturers leverage their investments in SAP®, and to take advantage of the world wide web of digital technologies, in order to help them become “easier to do business with”.

We’ve proven over the course of the last seven years that when our Clients become easier to do business with, when they make it easier for their Customers to buy from them and service themselves throughout the entire Order to Cash life-cycle, great things happen.

Our Clients:

  • run their businesses more efficiently and realize tangible cost savings,
  • can increase their average order size and top line revenue,
  • launch new products quicker
  • and find it easier to recruit new employees and customers

Our sole mission as a company is to continue to add value to our Clients, and their Customers, as they continue on their Digital Business journeys.  If we continue to find new ways to add value to their businesses, our Clients will support our business, and the virtual cycle will continue.

As a collection of individuals, working in what is essentially a software company, the only asset we have to offer our Clients is our time.   Our people devote their time to:

  • help our Clients’ put our software into production
  • operate our Clients’ digital business infrastructure,
  • help them get the most out of their B2B eCommerce websites (embrace new users, roles, features, monitor metrics etc)
  • continue to evolve our Corevist software,
  • and yes…even fix it when it breaks (as infrequent as that is).

So if time is our only asset, it stands to reason that we have to measure it.  For as the management gurus have preached for years…”if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” or it’s corollary “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.

You wouldn’t think of driving a car without a fuel gauge would you?  You don’t see scuba divers diving into the depths without pressure gauges.  You certainly don’t see elite athletes (or their weekend warrior equivalents) training without their array of stop watches, heart monitors and scales nowadays.  Weight Watchers has figured out that if people measure everything that they put in their mouths during the course of a day, that that facilitates the process of controlling their consumption.

So why wouldn’t everyone in a company who is striving to do their absolute best at delivering value to their customers, with the only asset that they can control…time…, support a system that measures how they spend their time?  Why wouldn’t everyone in a company that regularly rewards all of their employees with a share of the corporation’s profits want to make sure, that the single largest expense item (salaries) that can contribute to those profits in a meaningful way, is being spent the best way possible?

Because in the artisan world of software developers, individual’s think that tracking their time is a “big brother” invasion of their privacy.  They feel as if tracking their time is management’s way of conveying the simple message of “we don’t trust you”.  They take it personally and they take it as an affront.  They don’t want to feel like lawyers who track (and bill) their time in six minute intervals.

They don’t like change.

I’m here to say that:

  • Measuring time is a prerequisite to managing time.
  • Managing our time is the only lever we have to steer the company.
  • How we spend our time defines how much value we provide our Clients.
  • If we don’t deliver value to our Clients our days will be numbered.

The time has come to measure time, because in the end, that’s all we’ve got.

Sam