Improve business efficiency and reflect it value

As a programmer, most people work in software companies or Internet companies, but there must be many people working in IT departments of non-IT companies like me, do some development work.

In non-IT companies, the IT department is destined to be a service department, or a backend department, and the most "back-to-back" department. In such an environment, how can we reflect the value of programmers? We are not a direct source of profit for the company and cannot directly create value for the company. Therefore, we can only use one indirect method to reflect our value.

Since we serve business personnel, improving the efficiency of business personnel is the most important way to reflect the value.

This is easy to say. Especially those who work in software companies will say, "do a good job in the system and let the business staff use the system we have compiled. This will improve efficiency ." However, the situation is not clear. Even when the systems used by the business department are developed by a third-party software company, it is very difficult to improve work efficiency in many cases, otherwise, few people complain about the poor computer system, and there will be no recent online ticket sales by the Ministry of Railways.

If you want to do everything well, you need to think about it. The process of discovering, analyzing, and solving the problem also requires you to improve the efficiency of your business staff. Next, let's talk about my experience based on my work last year.

Since the second half of last year, I have been mainly responsible for the salary calculation and assessment process of one department of the company. However, the salary calculation process is very messy and the error rate is very high, so the check work is very complicated, it takes 8 to 10 working days to complete every pay-as-you-go operation. In these days, the business staff and I are exhausted and have the urge to get up and down upon hearing the call.

I found a time to carefully analyze the situation and found that many of my work is actually caused by the percentage of prize giving. The company has many types of insurance and multiple branches, and each type of insurance has many sales channels and insurance periods, payment method, etc. A combination of each condition has a ratio. In order to facilitate the process of raising the percentage of prize, some general methods were adopted, for example, replacing all sales channels with "00, for example, four company codes are used to include all the following sales organizations. However, in general cases, some special cases will be maintained separately.

The general method is to reduce the workload of the business. As a result, the maintenance and calculation of the award lead to greater confusion. The business staff cannot confirm whether the proportion of a condition combination has been maintained, it is often missed.

In response to this situation, we decided to limit the granularity of condition combinations to the finest, rather than using common code and methods. However, the number of records to be maintained increases significantly.

In fact, generating the most fine-grained records based on various conditions is completely mechanical. Here I use VBA to directly generate all the records in Excel, then, import the data directly to the system.

In this way, the efficiency of maintenance ratio is improved, and the error rate of salary calculation is also decreased. Even when the month with an error rate of 0 occurs, the inspection error process is completely reduced, the work efficiency has been greatly improved.

However, our story is not over yet, because I found that after the business department calculates the salary, it will also do the verification, which is also done manually, low Efficiency and error-prone. At this point, I still sacrifice the VBA weapon and write a macro to automate the process of checking the core.

After simplified processing of these two links, the original heavy salary calculation process has been reduced from more than eight days to two days, and the two days can still be easily spent. In this way, business personnel have more time to do more meaningful things.

From the above story, I have summarized the following points:

1. First, we need to clarify the key to the problem, that is, where the efficiency is low (find the main contradiction)

2. Analyze this link to see what problems exist. (Problem Analysis)

3. Find a solution to this problem. (Solve the problem)

4. iteration and refinement.

Do you have similar experiences in your work?