Vita's Tip In 10: How Process Workflow Can Save Time

Hello, hello friend, and welcome to a new episode of Vita’s Tip in 10!

Today we're diving deep into a crucial aspect of the window treatment business – the process flows. Now, this might sound like a bit of a departure from our usual content - trust me, it's directly related to you my friend, and all the window treatment professionals out there, especially those of you who handle estimates and orders.

At Vitalia Inc., we recently faced a challenge that prompted us to rethink our approach to converting estimates into orders. The problem? Our detailed orders weren't always final, which led to confusion and bottlenecks in our workflow. Our general manager (or in your company, it could be an office manager, administrator, or expediter) often didn't know if the order was ready to be placed after the client signed off on it.

To illustrate, let's say you have an estimate for a dining room project involving drapes, woven wood shades, and a custom cushion. When this estimate becomes an order within our company, we put together a document where we break down all the components and intricacies involved. We call it a detailed order, you may call it an invoice. So in our example, the order components involved would be Fabric A for the drapes, Fabric B for the cushion, decorative hardware, and woven wood shades.

Now, in an ideal world, everything would flow seamlessly once the client signed the order. However, in reality, changes and re-selections often occur even after the order is signed. The expediter then doesn't know whether she can go ahead and place those PO’s without having a conversation or emailing back and forth with our window treatment specialist. This created a disconnect between our expediter and window treatment specialist, leading to delays in the process.

If your business is small, with say, just two people, you and an admin, and your volume is in the range of $200,000 - $300,000, having verbal or email conversations might not be a big issue. It's not so terrible to have that conversation voice to voice, or face to face, or via email, because the volume is not big enough yet to create any kind of bottlenecks, ultimately slowing the whole process down.

As you grow and expand, my friend, you’ll start thinking about expanding your team and scaling your business from $200,000 to $500,000, then from $500,000 to $1M, then from $1M to $1.5M and above.

You will need more people handling all the tasks, and you will also need to streamline that communication so that nobody is waiting for anyone to reply. Communication needs to be streamlined to avoid bottlenecks, so that nobody needs to ask a question, and nobody is waiting for a reply.

And so that is exactly the situation that I discovered was happening within the Vitalia Inc. We would have a detailed order, it would be sent to the client, the client would sign it, and then there was this sort of standstill phase where no one was clear what the next step was.

The expediter didn't quite know whether the order was ready to be placed or not, because the window treatment specialist was too busy to update the order, or the selections hadn’t yet come in from our designers, or the window treatment specialist needed to do more research to finalize the order.

There are definitely circumstances within our complicated, sexy window treatment world where the order is good enough to be signed by the client, yet it's not quote unquote “orderable”. And so it became clear to me that we needed to have a process by which this communication did not rely on anyone being present, or on anyone answering an email, or having to send an email inquiry to begin with.

So, we decided to create a more efficient process with additional stages within our project management system, Airtable, which we've customized for our window treatment business over the years. The key lesson here is that the people closest to the process know it best, even if they can't necessarily make it better. While they understand all the stages, steps, and workarounds, it's crucial to formalize these steps to avoid delays and miscommunication.

So, we introduced additional stages to our workflow. The detailed order used to have one task associated with it: to create. And that task had two statuses open or complete. Now the detailed order has several associated tasks: (in addition to ‘create’) it has send to the client and to finalize. Each task can have either an "open" or "complete" status.

Here's how it works: The detailed order starts with the "create" task, marked as "open." This signals the window treatment specialist that it's their responsibility. Once they complete it, they change to the next task, "send to client."

After the order is sent to the client and signed, the next task is to "finalize." Yes, in an ideal world, orders would be finalized before being sent to clients - reality often dictates otherwise. Once "finalize" is complete, we move on to the "order" task, still marked as "open."

When this final task is marked as "complete," our general manager knows it's time to place the purchase orders. This clear and structured process eliminates the need for additional conversations or emails and prevents bottlenecks in our workflow.

In the next episode, we'll discuss who's responsible for performing these tasks and how we're automating communication to ensure everyone stays in the loop. Trust me, I'm one of those people who gets excited about optimizing processes, and I can't wait to share more with you.

If you'd like to see a visual representation of our process flow, head over to our website, where I'll post a snapshot of how we unpacked this verbally and visually with the audio and transcript of this episode.. And be sure to tune in next week for the exciting part of our journey – automated communications.

That’s it for today, my friend! And if you are looking for more tips just like this, if you’re looking to take control of your process workflows; if you’re looking for ways to enhance your productivity, if you’re looking for ways to start using a digital project management tool, if you are looking for ALL the systems to run your business like a well-oiled machine – you have two ways of working with me personally.

One is through LuAnn University, my Systems Driven Operations class. And the second is a two-day in-person intensive where I hand over all my systems for you to use and put to work immediately in your business. There are only a couple of openings left this year and the price will be going up in 2024. So if you’ve been on the fence, if you know deep inside that you need this and haven’t taken action, this is the time to do it.

Reach out and we’ll schedule a conversation.

And in the meantime, I will be working on my next episode of Vita’s Tip in 10. See you next Thursday!