Good ideas are often born when one person shouts, “Enough!”
For Glen Lumia, that moment occurred when he couldn't find a specific piece of information he needed. Despite a shared server, Lumia and his nine office employees at Creative Design Construction and Remodeling, in Northvale, N.J., sometimes stored data on their individual stations. So Lumia developed the “road map,” an electronic workflow and process chart created in Visio, from Microsoft Office.
Basically a series of folders containing the company's electronic information, the road map is broken down into five main centers: Administrative ; Finance; Human Resources; Production-Operations; and Sales-Design-Marketing. “I based [the road map] on common sense,” Lumia says, “and tweaked it with staff input.”
The first level in each center is made up of templates — Forms and Checklists, Procedures, Global — which cannot be moved or changed.
Beyond that are four or five more layers, depending on the topic. For example, if you need “cold letters,” those that are sent out to former clients, you'd go from the Administrative center to Forms and Checklists to Letters to Client Letters to Cold Letters.
Since its inception nearly two years ago, Lumia says, new hires have an easier time navigating, “and I haven't gotten one question as to where anything is. To me, that's a huge success.”
See the entire road map at www.remodelingmagazine.com/webextras.
