Blog# 3: Is Microsoft Visio "Charting" the Right Course for our Company?

Good afternoon Mr. Rolando,

In an effort to continue being a market leader, I have been looking into Microsoft Visio and whether this program is suitable for our company's needs. After downloading the 2013 version, navigating the options, and creating basic flowcharts, I do see a real benefit to supplying our sales, marketing, and management with Visio.

Benefit: Uniformity and Simplicity
As with any new software, we will need to determine the optimal training schedule to ensure our employees are familiar with Visio and all of the tools within the program. Visio is best known for flowcharts, diagrams, and organizational charts (link# 1), but it can also be used to draw up floor plans and other designs. One of Visio's main appeal is the ease and simplicity that will shorten the learning curve for our personnel. By training the key employees (I would recommend managers, sales force, and marketing), we can update our organizational charts to be consistent across the departments and also use this tool for presentations and meetings. Aside from internal use, our sales force can easily (once trained) conjure up diagrams pertaining to specific customers', so a greater use of visual aids can be brought to meetings.

I want to make you aware that during our earlier discussions about Google Drive, I mentioned the importance of  having 24/7 access to documents, especially on cross-departmental projects. The same can be done with Visio through Microsoft's SharePoint or 365 (link# 1). I believe that by offering the option to share documents digitally and reduce that distance barrier, it can improve collaboration amongst colleagues and even across departments. This can be a meeting for another time, but the idea of sharing documents and having it be a living document allows our company to eliminate those distance barriers.

The tangible benefits I see from implementing Visio in the workplace would be a stronger impact during presentations. By having this software that can easily show customers how we handle their requests, this can lead to an increased confidence within our organization. Also, by creating the flowcharts and diagrams, my overall goal would be to see an improved response time to problems, meeting requests, and processing orders. If every customer service representative (12 total) could enter even 3 more orders a day, this could increase our daily revenue (before taxes) to $43,200 (3 extra 2 drum orders @ $600/drum) - $1,980,000 (3 extra 1 bulk orders @ 55,000/bulk). I see real potential here for improving our processes, response time, and overall sales.

Concerns: Cost and Relevancy
Although I was able to download a free version of this software, a standard edition can run upwards of $300. Given, on estimate, that we would initially want to try this with the three managers of our departments, two marketing associates, and ten sales reps, that would be a cost of $4,500. We would then have to add the training time, but again I would split up the sessions so that not everyone was out of commission at the same time. I approximate 3-4 hours of training, but we can utilize our IT department to handle the training so no outside expenses would incur. I do expect to see some lost sales during this training period as we would not be able to have everyone attend at once. While the three managers would not affect any lost sales within their respective department, I do foresee some complications with the marketing associates and sales representatives.

To begin with the two marketing associates, there would be 3-4 hours where no samples could go out or websites/blogs can be updated. Whereas we can have an out of office message, should a hot rush sample be sent in, this training could miss our opportunity to attract a new customer. In a typical scenario when dealing with samples, it usually leads to a 1-2 drum (Chemicals) purchase, which can cost approximately $600 total ($300/drum). Although the loss of sale is not great, we would want to propose letting customers know of this downtime in advance.

With respect to the ten sales reps, this day off that would need to be taken for training could affect customer visits and availability to their specific customer service representative. If I had to quantity these costs, having to reschedule or miss a customer visit could also potentially lead to missed competitive information given at the meetings and having urgent issues handled by our competitors. Depending on the customer visit that may be missed/rescheduled, this could result in anywhere from $600 (small drum orders) to $55,000 (large bulk orders). I know each of the sales reps may not have a customer visit on the day of that training, but if each one ran into this situation, the total costs for all ten sales reps would be ($6,000 - $550,000).

My other concern would be the real need to invest in this software as Microsoft Word does enable the user to create flowcharts and diagrams. Plus, with PowerPoint, we have a tool that can be used as a visual aid in meetings and presentations. Yet, I will say that for auditing purposes, we want to make sure we have a flow chart for each process that our various employees undertake on a daily basis. Microsoft Visio is a tool that was made to be user friendly and customizable. If you look at this quick video, you will see how easy it can be to create a swim lane that would be ideal for our customer service department (link# 2).

Just think about what this can do for our image when explaining to customers (with this visual) how their orders are handled or possibly how we prepare our processes.
As always, I look forward to following-up with you to further discuss if we will be moving forward with this initiative.

Link# 1: http://visio.microsoft.com/en-us/preview/visio-benefits.aspx
Link# 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvMdAldXdl0