Automation Is The key to Success
Organizing Your Business for Success
Are Newborn Competitors Eating Away at Your Profits?
The Right Frame of Mind
Three Common Mistakes You Should Avoid
Hidden Costs of a Documentation System (you'll love this!)
Using MicroSoft Office…
The Ultimate Solution
Your Wasted Time
Don't Be Scared of Auditors’ Visits!
Consultants and External Quality Assurance Special Edition Now Available
Consultants Personal Version
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Announcing "IsoWriter", the most cost effective solution in the universe for your document management. Your HACCP manual / ISO 9000 / Vision 2000 certification at your fingertips, completely hands free. Now available on-line with a special launch offer at less than 1/2 of its normal quotation.
Save Your Valuable Time And Money By Fully Automating Your Document Management System.
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Learn How To Turn A Time-Consuming Activity Into A Profitable Asset that Can Push Your Company Ahead of Your Fierce Competition.
At last, after years of development, we're able to give you the first chance of trying this cutting edge software that will completely change your life by fully automating all aspects of your document management. You can try it for free right now with no risk at all. Click here for instant access.
"We were one of the first companies to use IsoWriter and we have watched the product grow and increase in it’s potential over a period of time. As manager of the company’s quality system, I find IsoWriter fantastic. It’s with personal pride that I use all the functions that were inserted at our suggestion. That’s why I like IsoWriter, it was designed with people like me in mind, who have sweated long and hard over their quality documents and know what it means." Dr. Michela di Maria - m.dimaria@cna.it
Statistics say that over 54% of the companies out there are experiencing trouble with their documentation. If your company is not in deep water with document management, are you sure that you are not paying too much for it? And what is "too much"?
This site has been designed to help you give the right value to your document management and tell you all the tricks and what works best with regards to:
- Organizing your company
- The value of the documentation in your company
- Why and how much to invest in document management
- Why newborn companies may have a greater advantage over old ones
- Hidden costs: how much they are and how to shut them down
- Why you should consider and be aware of the hidden costs derived from document management
- How to cut all costs derived from your documentation system and turn them into an extra profit for your company
- Why Microsoft Office can be a solution that may endure, but with headaches
- Software options to ease your life
- How to be ISO 9000 / VISION 2000 compliant and have more time to promote your business
- How getting your ISO 9000 / VISION 2000 certification can be a snap
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Automation Is The Key To Success
I really believe that we are living in a fantastic technological era. We are all completely amazed at the lightening speed of progress and where it’s going. We are so used to digital television, cellular phones, satellite communications that we usually forget about the impressive technology that stays behind. What is incredible to me is that most of the rocket scientist technology is at public disposal and at low prices if not altogether free.
You, me, everybody on earth today has access to something that only 10 years ago we simply didn't dream of. With today’s technology you can do whatever you want, you can reach the other side of the world in a fraction of a second and, above all, you can automate almost everything.
Automation...
You can see newborn companies grow at top speed thanks to their automation. This idea involves all aspects of daily life as well as businesses. Nowadays the secret of a successful business is automation. Everything must be automated in your company to survive the progress wave and, if you cannot automate your company to its full extent, you should at least organize it so that everyone in the company knows what to do in most situations most of the time.
Your company should be able to survive even without your presence, when you're out promoting your business, or on holiday. Remember that your business must be continuously promoted, your activity is to model your process flow to overcome the competition and that the time spent on administrative issues is time stolen from your business.
Just think about this: if you could organize your work to be completely automated, you could retire to Bora Bora, doing nothing except receive a message everyday telling you your bank balance! This "perfect system" hardly seems real, but if you want to achieve 100 out of a 100 you must try for 110, so if you try to realize the "perfect system" chances are that you will be able to take a short holiday without messy hassles.
Organizing Your Business for Success
The way to organize your company to be fully automated is to break it down to its bare basics and then defining every item in detail. You should then try to identify all processes involved in the normal working activity and all the problems that may arise from them. For example, your order processing: how do your customers place their orders? Do you have an order form? Are you going to send a fax confirmation? Which is the latest fax template? How will it be filled out? What if the customer cancels an item or the whole order? What actions should be taken?
All process flows must be described in detail along with all actions to be taken, the responsibilities involved, the goals to be reached, modules to use. This can be a very time consuming activity, but remember that the better you describe your company’s processes, the easier will be to automate it.
Sometimes it’s better to survey the situation and think about the best action to take instead of carrying on and only consequently taking any countermeasures. Don't forget that the time invested in describing your business process is done once and will be worth thousands in the future.
A lot of benefits come from describing your business accurately:
- Your employee training will be easier and shorter because they will have written material to consult
- If you need to hire a programmer to automate some processes, you can give him/her a description instead of explaining everything from scratch with the risk of forgetting something
- Should you detect a bottleneck in your organization, it will be easier to fix it by simply revising the description of the process flow involved
- If you don't provide something written, you run the risk that no one knows what to do in unusual situations and your presence will be continually requested.
- If there is no coded path, your company could behave differently in the same situation, giving customers an unprofessional image
Are you starting to see the importance of describing your business to better organize it?
Are Newborn Competitors Eating Away at Your Profits?
New successful companies may have a greater advantage over existing ones because they have been designed and optimized at the drawing board before being set up. Of course it’s easier to build a skyscraper from its project than from an existing wooden cottage!
Your advantage is that you're already a skyscraper in credibility while your competitors must still build theirs, but if you don't face this reality and you don't keep your company on the edge of the progress wave, the risk of you ending up having an old-fashioned company and being blown away shortly is very strong.
Describing all the processes involved in your business is just the first step, the next step will be to decide who makes what and to re-plan your organization creating a set of profiles to be assigned to each physical person.
When all employees in your company are aware of their duties and know exactly what they have to do in all situations, the job has almost been done! From now on your machine has been switched on and your work will be to concentrate on your business and optimize your process flow.
Don't think that this will be easy!
Most companies take months or even years hiring external specialists or consultants to give themselves a new image. This is just the beginning, but your most important move. Once you have described your company processes, you have laid the foundations on which to build an even better organization: at this point it’s the documentation system that checks whether everything is going just as YOU have planned.
Now let’s go a little step further…
The Right Frame of Mind
Extending the above considerations to a world wide accepted standard, you have the ISO 9000 standards. In effect, the aim of these standards is to help you turn your company into a well-oiled fully automated machine with known and optimized processes and responses.
The certification should only be the "acknowledgement" that your organization satisfies the standards requirements. Unfortunately, this basic idea has often been wrongly viewed as an empty symbolic "trademark" that differentiates companies from one another and which companies use to overcome the competition, without having any quality background...
Seeing things from this point of view is not going to be a smart move on your part!
Let me say a few words about this. You definitely want to automate your business because by doing so you will be more competitive and you will have more time to promote it. The best way to automate your business is to plan its organization at the drawing board and describing in detail all processes involved. You're doing this for your business because it will grow and you will be able to offer a better service at a lower price.
You are not just looking for a trademark to advertise!
If you don't confront such a big change with the right frame of mind, you will end up having a very expensive external trademark and not a single internal benefit in return. Furthermore, to maintain your external image of a certified company while in reality it’s something you could care less about; you are going to keep alive a virtual organization that will curb your business. Nobody will understand why they have to do the same thing numerous times and in different ways. Instead of accepting all duties as part of the normal evolution of your business you will have to face nasty impositions that risk discouraging your initiative.
Even under this incorrect point of view the "core documentation" assumes a crucial importance in your company life. Your organization's documentation becomes the heart of your business, the "bible" in which all activities are recorded. Fax templates, proposals, thank you notes, and any other kind of predefined document as well as data sheets relevant to your organization, become part of your documentation system.
To let everyone know about their assignment profile and related position within your organization, all employees must have a copy of the documentation describing it. When you decide to optimize or change a process flow, you have to retire the updated documents to avoid confusion and redistribute the new ones so that anyone knows about the changes and they will be able to consequently act upon them.
What I call "core documentation" has different names depending on the specification: i.e. "Quality manual" for ISO 9000 / VISION 2000, Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) manual for pharmacies or food related activities, behavior handbooks for services operators, quality plan, sanitary protocols, etc. Anyway, a well-organized activity is based on the "core documentation" and the documents it generates. Can you see that you must give special attention to this generally overlooked aspect of your business?
Standard Requirements of a Documentation System
Apart from the formalities to be respected in describing all the internal processes of your business activity (which may have to be done from scratch and may take months as well as external consultants),
Which Requirements Must Be Satisfied by a Documentation System?
First of all, the process can be very long and tricky and involve a lot of related documents (i.e. an order form, a fax confirmation, the customer receipt and so on). Therefore a document management system must provide a way to "link" related documents to each other.
Because your documentation is likely to be update and distributed many times, how will you know if everyone has got the latest version? If you have two copies of the same document in your hand, how will you know which is the updated one? And if the document is very large and the changes are very limited, how will people know about your updates without having to visually compare the new document with the obsolete one?
Well, a way to ease these issues is to "mark" each document page with some attributes like an edition number, date and title, number of pages and highlighting all modifications made to the previous release using different character styles and/or colors. For example, red italic is generally used to indicate inserted text, while blue strikeout for deleted characters.
Is it that easy?
What if the staff is out when you distribute your updated documentation? When they bring you their copy of the documentation, how do you know exactly and in a short time, which documents must still be upgraded? If your documentation is voluminous and your business is not home-based, you could consider giving each one in the company only the sections they're involved with. In this case, how do you know what to distribute to whom?
ISO (International Standard Organization) studied and codified all of these issues including the results in the ISO 9000 standards and additional note ISO 10013. These standards recall the necessity of a procedural approach to the updating and archiving processes used in a controlled documentation system. To satisfy these needs they also advice the use and maintenance of:
- Matrix reports relating documents to the edition currently in use
- Distribution lists for each document
- Receipt collections from all participants to the distribution
- A version number of the whole handbook.
There are at least two reasons to adhere to these prescriptions: they represent the best answer to all previously asked questions and, if you follow the draft specifications, you will be ready to comply to the standard the moment you'd like to.
Well....
Things have become far more complicated than what they seemed at the beginning: dealing with a good documentation system isn't that easy and can bog down your business.
Organizing your business this way or complying with ISO 9000 / VISION 2000 standards is a "venture" which will pay hundreds of times over in the long term, but could run the risk of turning into a big hassle and penalizing your business in the short term if you confront it unprepared. The good news is that if you keep on reading you will learn how to successfully face this issue.
Three Common Mistakes You Should Avoid
At this point there are three major mistakes that most companies make:
- Not to invest in document management at all
- Be held back by document management and loose the focus of the business
- Overlook the hidden costs derived from the document management system in use
If you decide not to bother with the documentation to be distributed within your company, you will have to verbally train your employees about their duties. This can be a slow and painful process because, during this period, they will continually check with you in each and every situation where they don't remember or they don't know.
The resulting training period will be lengthened and, above all, this is going to be a poor investment, as it will have to be repeated again and again from scratch each time you loose a trained employee.
Remember that the investment made on an employee is part of your company's assets for as long as this person is part of your business organization. If he / she leaves your company, the investment is lost forever!
Hidden Costs of a Documentation System
Managing your documentation can be a very time consuming activity. The risk here is to not keeping this idea in mind or forgetting that it should only be a support activity to help you grow your business. Whatever your business is, write your mandate in big letters and don't forget it!
Did you know that filing a four-drawer filing cabinet will cost you over $64.000?
If you think it’s too much, consider this: the four drawer filing cabinet can contain about 40.000 pages, each page must be written, revised and controlled for typos, formatted and then printed.
How many times did you have to reprint a document because of a problem related to format errors, printer head problems, exhausted ink / ribbon cartridges, paper feed errors, stopped queues, workstation / server shutdowns and so on?
Statistics say that these types of problems may increment the average printing times to up to 300%! Therefore we're not far from this reality if we consider the average time of an hour to produce a single sheet. Let’s do some maths here. The standard sustained salaries (professionals, contributions, etc. included) may range from $20.000 to $40.000 a year: let's consider the average of $30.000. In Europe a working year is made of 264 * 8 hours working days, which means 2.512 hours a year. That makes a cool $30.000 / 2.512 = $15 a sheet (hour). Not that much for only one sheet, but how many sheets do you think you're going to produce in a full year of business activity?
If you consider your document management system as any other process and try to automate it to its maximum extent you can definitely save a five-figure amount in one single year! And this is money in your pocket that would otherwise eat away at your profit margin!
First consideration: if everyone in your company has his/her own workstation, you could set up a software application able to substitute all the printing distribution, distribution lists management and receipt phases.
Secondly, you want to automate the whole document production. Remember that your documentation should have some specific characteristics as described above, so this can be a very difficult issue.
Finally, your document management system must have a built-in security structure to let you adequately protect your documents from being modified or accidentally deleted by unauthorized people.
Using MicroSoft Office…
Now, if your company is not certified, I know you are probably thinking to yourself: "I know what I want and I will do everything using my usual text editor or a suite like Microsoft Office. That’s a fair consideration, but you must be aware of a few cons:
- You won't have a fully automated document management system working the way you would like if you don't use Access, which is distributed only in the full license pack. So you will have to install a pro license on all workstations (about $600 each!)
- You must be deeply skilled in VBA and OLE automation to do the job and, in general, you will end up hiring a programmer to create a customized solution.
- If one of your employees is that skilled so as to give you the software solution that you're looking for, what if he / she leaves your company?
- An office automation package in general is a very high resource consuming product and you will probably have to consider investing in hardware / networking resources to limit the performance degradation.
- As performance can be penalized when using network drives, if you don't find a way to "compel" everyone to use them, they will use the "Save as…" options when necessary and you will end up having your documentation disseminated on all local hard disks, no version control and, what’s worse, in files with cryptic names (i.e. Doc1.doc, Doc001.doc, etc). That way the centralization will be completely lost and the risk of loosing important documents is high, as is the case when a hardware fault occurs. Generally only network drives are backed up on a regular basis.
Did You Know That With Each Lost Document You Are Loosing As High As
$125 ?
There are a number of software applications floating around that you can use to automate your document management, some are very complicate, others less, but all solutions generally require the setting up and running of a database like Oracle or SQL Server. A database is a high TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) class product because not only does it have a high purchase value, but it may also need a dedicated server, additional licenses, installation, fine tuning, maintenance, etc, you get the point…
The Ultimate Solution
Ok, now the good news.
What I didn't tell you until now is that today there is a piece of software that makes document management a genuine breeze.
We named it "IsoWriter" and it’s the result of 3 full years of research, development and testing. This state-of-the-art product will completely automate all operations involving your documentation: using it you will only have to write your document body and concentrate on your business, IsoWriter will do the rest!
Your Documentation Will Be Ready And Updated In Real Time On All Workstations
With No Hands On Involvement
No more distribution lists, no more bothering with headers / footers, revision indicators and no more databases at all!! Everything is totally handled by IsoWriter.
Moreover, this cutting edge software comes with a built-in special function that directly controls the printer spooler, so,
No More Wasting Time Because Of Printing Problems!
Not only is IsoWriter ISO 9000 / VISION 2000 compliant and a real godsend for all companies and not only for the certified ones, but it’s the sole product in the universe that has an internal editor that will save you from having to purchase any costly additional licenses.
Nevertheless, it’s fully integrated with Microsoft Word, therefore if you already have your quality manual, HACCP manual or any other kind of documentation in .doc format, you can insert it into the application with a single click of the mouse.
When using Microsoft Word as the default editor, IsoWriter uses customizable templates to add an automatically updated header and footer to each document page. You will be using Word in a completely controlled session in which the only action you will have to take care of will be to write your document body and the job is done!
As this special tool does everything,
You Don't Have to Know How to Use Word's Revision Control
Here are two screen captures showing how automatic revision indicators are used and how your document management can be centralized and easily maintained
"Thanks to Isowriter I am confident now that our documentation is always up to date and processed in the most professional manner, my staff needs only be concerned with inserting the text required." Donato Riccesi - riccesid@tin.it
I will state it again: using this powerful tool will enable you to fully automate your document management in an easy and centralized manner.
All documents are encrypted and password protected so it will be impossible to have them modified or deleted by unauthorized personnel. I will give you a few numbers here to stress you a little more on the importance of this concept.
Your Wasted Time
How much time (and money) do you spend on your documentation? Here’s what
stats say:
| Type of operation |
Manager |
Executive |
Clerk |
| Search |
5 - 10% |
10 - 15% |
10 - 20% |
| Duplicate |
- |
- |
2 - 10% |
| Distribute |
- |
1 - 2% |
2 - 10% |
| Archive |
- |
1 - 2% |
2 - 20% |
If a piece of software saves you only 5 minutes a day...in a year that adds up to a 40 hours working week. Can you see the power of automation? Can you see where I'm coming from?
This software will pay for itself with the time you save using it. The more you use it the more time (and money) you save.
"IsoWriter is the package which companies dreamed of but didn’t exist, in every sense of the word. It’s easy to use, just install it and off you go, no long setup procedures are needed. It’s the most convenient: there are no hidden costs and it has all the functionality, which is what an end user really wants. Therefore, we have no doubt, whatsoever, in recommending this product to our clients." Dr. L.B. Mbengue - mbengue@abs.it
IsoWriter is freely downloadable to give you the opportunity of evaluating and testing it. The trial version is fully functional, but some features have been disabled. Click here now to download your free evaluation copy of IsoWriter
Don't Be Scared of Auditors’ Visits!
For those of you who are not already ISO 9000 certified, I will explain how this works. After you finally get your certification, authorized auditors will periodically check your organization, at your expenses. What an auditor first does is to formally check your documentation system and your company compliance with it. When something wrong is detected, the auditor raises a non-conformity exception, gives you the time to correct it and MUST RETURN, at your expenses, to recheck your organization. In Europe the standard fee for auditors is about
$1000 a day.
If you get your certification and don't keep complete control of your documentation, you will end up throwing your money away on the repeated visits of your auditors!
Because of this, when the documentation passes all verifications, most companies are unwilling to change a single comma for fear of doing something wrong or wasting too much time for post-update controls.
This way you will become slave to your documentation, what will consequently bog down your business instead of giving you the advantage to run the pants off your competitors!
Using IsoWriter you will be sure that your documentation will be completely auditor-proof.
This cutting edge product is normally priced at $1000 for the stand-alone basic version, but as it’s available for the first time on the Internet, to better promote it, we decided to give it away at a special YOU-CAN’T-MISS launch offer. If you act now, for only $697 ($497 for the stand-alone version) you will receive your license based on a per company basis, regardless of the number of users. That is, you pay a mere $697 and the game is over. No more license fees ever for your whole company, whatever the number of workstations you're going to run it on.
No One Else Will Give You A Special Offer Like This Again!
"We felt unwilling to change our documentation frightened by all bureaucratic consequences. We heard of IsoWriter and things suddenly changed! Thanks to its simple, user friendly and efficient document management, we definitely felt comfortable with the improvement to our quality system" Dr. Massimiliano du Ban - farmapic@spin.it
IsoWriter is freely downloadable to give you the chance of evaluating and testing it. The trial version is fully functional, but some features have been disabled. Click here now to download your free evaluation copy of IsoWriter
This breakthrough solution comes with a special feature that will ease your working life even further. You can group your documentation into "working folders", thus duplicating the same formal document organization as many times as you like. For just another $100, not only can you easily manage your "core documentation" the way you had never dreamed of before, but your HACCP manual, personal documents, or even data sheet collections will be at your fingertips in just a couple of clicks!
Here is a screen capture showing the "working folder" selection
In the past the document management related to our quality system was a heavy activity of great impact on our company. Starting to automate it gave us immediate benefits:
- Total control over our documentation
- More free time for our Quality Assurance to improve our quality system
- Better and enthusiastic participation of the whole staff involved
in the quality system
- Auditors now trust our company and our quality system and audits are nothing more than a formality
IsoWriter has been of great help in generating formally correct documentation with very little involvement from our staff. Using this software tool made us improve our efficiency and cut the time for document management by more than a half.
Mauro Rizzo - CAAU
rizzo@caau.it
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There are a number of ways for you to order your very own copy of IsoWriter.
Please click here to see all available options.
Remember, this is a special launch offer that may be pulled at any time, so I urge you not to hesitate: act now, download your free evaluation version and try it RISK-FREE right now, you have absolutely nothing to lose.
Sincerely,
Sandro Savelli
President - SdB
P.S. 10 minutes from now, you too could be on your way to getting your ISO 9000 / VISION 2000 certification. This software is on the cutting edge of technology tools available today!
P.P.S. This is your opportunity to get your competition to chicken out and be one of the few companies free from hassles with document management.
P.P.P.S. Can you name another piece of software available today that comes with an offer like ours? No one else has the confidence that we do. Should you find a better solution at a lower price, please don't hesitate to contact us immediately.
P.P.P.P.S. If you don't claim your own copy of IsoWriter now – and we decide to pull the offer – you will miss an unrepeatable occasion of riding the progress wave at a very low price.
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Special edition for Professionals, Consultants, External Quality Assurance and Certification Institutes.