I am definitely proud of the fact that we try to be a “smart” Translation Company. Obviously that can mean a lot of things, but for me its basically trying to work as efficiently as possible. Whether that means using technology or just simply organizing things in a way to maximize efficiency then that is “smart” and I really think we do a good job of this.

An example of what I am talking about is how we improved things in the accounting department. It used to be the case that everyone used to come to the accounting department for everything. Thanks to the intranet and our accounting software we were able to give power to the users (you the employees) and more specifically take the burden of answering away from accounting (which means they have more time for other things). One good example of this is the ability to check vacations and to reserve them online. Plus there are forms available on the intranet if there are changes to your bank account, your identity card, your name, your address, your tax office. With any of these things you print out the appropriate form and deliver it to accounting. This is very simple, but saves a lot of time. In addition there is information there about the company, that allows you to get what you need without asking accounting for it. Documents such as our KRS, REGON, NIP, bank account and lots of other company details are available on the intranet. All in all it’s a huge reduction in work for accounting. If we continued to manually handle all these requests we’d need more people working in accounting and we’d be less profitable. This is a good example of being a “smart” company.

Anyway, this is an example and it brings me to the improvement I wanted to discuss in this post.

I recently had a brief with one of the IT guys and we were talking about how to improve things in the department and he had a good idea in my opinion. The IT department has done a good job defining problems and solving them and these solutions are all ready and available at the IT helpdesk website. The problem is that often people come to IT or helpdesk with problems that have already been solved and described in the helpdesk user procedures. Since our IT guys are so nice and helpful they simply explain the solution again to the person asking. However, I think it would be much better for them to get the user to refer back to the procedures and try to solve the problem themselves. These are not very complex issues and problems and I think if we took this extra time to try to solve things ourselves we could save the time of our IT guys.