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Monthly Archives: September 2019

I upgraded my personal UI.

Posted on 25/09/2019 - 12:40 pm by

6 years ago I moved to Ireland from my native Belarus. After a couple of days shopping in Dublin’s Stephen’s Green and Ikea, I explored the medieval beauty of my new hometown. I needed to find a doctor in my new surroundings and on my first visit I had a funny experience. I almost missed my appointment because my lovely doctor was calling my name but I did not recognise it as my own.
I loved my Belorussian name but it was difficult for Irish people to spell and pronounce. When they did it was difficult for me to recognise it. There is no sweeter sound to someone than that of their name. This was not the case for me anymore. I had to make a decision.

I decided to upgrade my personal UI, make it more user-friendly.

I changed my name. Thankfully I found one with the same meaning. I kept my personality. At the same time it was easier for my new friends, colleagues, classmate and neighbours to communicate with me. The bonus was that I didn’t need to spell it six times on the phone or at the reception!
Now working with Veri I am thinking about that name situation as streamlining my data. My new name allows people to engage with me easily, to interact with me in a more productive way, to report or send a request to me addressing it correctly.

Data is so important. It must be clear and useful.

Think about the archive room in a training company. I can help you to imagine it: shelves and shelves of folders with papers, some of them in boxes, some of them are missing so you can see gaps on the shelves and piles of paperwork on the table.
Now imagine this, your manager asks you for a TACS report sheet from 2017. You know it’s in that room somewhere but you can’t decipher the storage pattern. Searching is time consuming and you can’t find the data you need.
How cool would it be if all the papers could transform in the most convenient order to provide you with the information of interest? This is exactly what we do here at Veri.
We spend some time together. We get so know each other. Then we digitise your data transforming your paperwork into data intelligence. Your data will be clear and useful and easy to recognise just like my new name is. All you have to do is make the decision and we will do the rest.

Eugena Valadkevich – Customer Success Manager

 

Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail

Posted on 16/09/2019 - 9:31 pm by

 It is amazing how your professional life seeps into your thoughts when you least expect it. I see so many places where the software that I work on daily could save people time and money. The digitisation of processes and quality assurance would benefit most organisations. The ability to review in real time would make an immeasurable difference to any company. 
One example came to mind and it is one of the most contentious topics in Irish Sport over the last 20 years.
Roy Keane leaving the Irish Soccer team on the eve of the 2002 World Cup.
It divided a nation and still does.
Keane was captain of the Irish team at the time. Keane was very disappointed at the facilities and preparation Ireland had achieved in preparation for the World Cup Finals.  He was quoted in the Irish Times saying:

 “I was disappointed it happened, the way in panned out. I know there are two sides to every story. There was a lot of talk when we got over there about the facilities. That was well documented. I was disappointed at no bibs, balls, cones and it really irritated me because if it happened to Brazil or Germany there would have been uproar.
“But for some reason, because it was Ireland, it was like a laugh and a joke. I had enough years of laughing and joking. I felt at the time we had to give ourselves the best opportunity”

What resulted was a spectacular fall out with Ireland manager Mick McCarthy. The altercations culminated in Keane been sent home. Ireland played without Keane. The  team  managed to make it to the last 16 of the tournament. They secured their plane tickets home when they  lost out to Spain on penalties.  
The fallout from this rumbled on for many years. The whole saga resulted in the publication of The Genesis Report. The report recommended how the FAI should be run from both a governance, structural and management perspective.  The Genesis Report, though not fully implemented by the FAI, still resulted in quite a few changes with regards to its management structure and governance.
If only Veri was around then, maybe Saipan wouldn’t send shivers down the spines of every football fan in Ireland. 

Shane Barron- CTO 


How to join movement to a better planet…. and to a better profit and loss.

Posted on 09/09/2019 - 12:25 pm by

This week we have read about wildfires in Brazil, single use plastics and the ecological impact of doing nothing. As our children head back to their schools, these millennials are fully aware of the need to reduce, re-use and re-cycle.

But are we the managers & business owners doing enough to work towards a paperless office?

Cost to the environment: As you read the next paragraph, a forest area the size of 20 GAA pitches will be lost for paper production use alone. In the last year, logging in the South-eastern U.S. resulted in a loss of land about the size of New Jersey (5 million acres). In fact, the area of natural pine forest there, has declined in size from 72 million acres in 1953 to 33 million acres in 1999. This is where most of the trees used to make paper come from (an astonishing 26% of the world’s supply, to be exact) and it’s clearly in critical danger. As if this doesn’t sound doomsday-ish enough, global production in the paper sector is expected to increase by 77% between 1995 and 2020.
Costs to your company: Besides the consequences that paper has on the environment, it also has a significant impact on companies’ finances. Some studies show that an average worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year and others estimate that the average office worker uses a sheet of paper every 12 minutes. While the paper itself may not be expensive, other costs – like printing, signing, copying, archiving and finding the right dossier – are. And they don’t only cost money, they are time-consuming too.

It is estimated that a company with a 100 employees spends from €10.000 up to €25.000 each year only for its internal consumption of paper and the maintenance of equipment.

In total the unnecessary impressions (forgotten, thrown away, lost) would represent a cost of 300 million euro according to an estimate made by the National Union of Image and Information Media.
Solutions: So what can be done?
• Use business analytics software like Veri : Integrate software that automates manual reporting and QA analysis, and electronically distributes reports over the web or on mobile devices. One mid-size company estimates that it saved enough paper to cover 5,519 GAA pitches on a yearly basis simply by moving manual-based financial and operational reporting processes to a business intelligence system.
• Re-align business processes: Automate and streamline business processes among people and systems, reducing paper consumption by eliminating unnecessary papers trails and content storage costs.
• Move business tasks to an electronic format: Encourage non-technical employees to try electronic forms and survey software that does not require an IT department’s resources. Traditionally, compiling forms and surveys required several technical workers weeks, not minutes, at a significant cost in an IT department’s time and salaries.
Despite all the efforts that can and should be made, companies will always end up using paper up to some degree. In this case, the best way to proceed is to make sure these papers end up their life cycle in the most sustainable way. This means making paper’s life cycle circular and recycling it. Therefore, it’s important that the offices are equipped with sorting bins and that the staff is taught on what can or cannot be recycled.
If you are in a training or programme management role why not find out more on how you can contribute to a greener planet and your company’s Corporate Social Responsibility – Contact Veri