We at Management Advisory Systems have made a decision to learn some good, environmentally responsible habits. And we encourage others to follow.

Terri Melle-Johnson from Greenwise Bankcard has developed some simple easy steps that anyone can follow to make a difference.

Buy smarter

Try finding gently used secondhand products instead of buying new, particularly for items like office furniture, equipment, appliances, clothes, etc.   Borrow books and videos from the library. You can also buy in bulk to save money.   Do not buy bottled water or canned beverages.  Get a water filter for the tap water and use refillable bottles.

Meet Smarter

Reduce all business travel to web-meetings, Skype, etc.  Bundle up all phone services for best rates to reduce long distance call charges. If you have to travel look for green hotels at the Green Lodging Association.

Print Smarter

Save money on ink and paper by checking to see if you really need a paper copy of a particular document before hitting the print button. Use the draft mode for printing which will use less ink and save you money in the long run. Get a recycling company to pick up your office paper waste.  Put bins next to the printer exclusively for printer paper.  Save and refill ink cartridges for a fraction of the cost.

Carry Smarter

No more plastic bags.  Use cloth shopping bags.  Put them in the car so you don’t forget them for your next trip to office depot.

Save Energy

Set your office or home thermostat down a few degrees in the winter and up a few degrees in the summer will waste less energy. Changing to compact fluorescent light bulbs will save energy and put fewer light bulbs in landfills. Use green power strips to control office equipment usage.  Always turn the lights off at closing.

Brew Smarter

Use reusable coffee filters and never have to buy a filter again. Use ceramic mugs instead of disposable cups.

Clean Up Smarter

Use cloth rags instead of paper towels for cleaning.  Mix vinegar and water, put in a spray bottle and use as non-toxic cleaner.

Save Fuel

Have staff car pool or telecommute or even use the public transportation.

Save Time, Food, and Calories

Have staff eat healthier by brown-bagging.  Offer a no-heat required pot-luck type lunch one day a week and eat-in the office.  Build a sub and build morale!  This builds a better office morale, is healthier and saves money.

You will see some real differences in how we do business.

A plain english definition. . .

“Outsourcing is the turning over of processes within your organization to outside service providers who can utilize economies of scale (by doing the same thing for many similar customers) to provide you with the same level of service you could get from performing the process internally.”

Outsourcing can be an alternative to performing some functions within your own company but rarely is it the only answer.

As recently as January of this year, a well respected major outsourcing provider, Satyam Computer Services, perpetrated a major financial fraud ($1 billion fradulent cash entry) that caused many of its customers to experience significant disruption to their operations.  Some of their Fortune 500 customers such as Cigna, Cisco Systems, Caterpillar, Ford, General Electric, Nestle, General Motors and many thers were affected by the scandal.  Some had systems and procedures in place to deal with the service disruptions and some didn’t.  Those that didn’t experienced major business disruptions.

Just imagine that your worldwide (or local) payroll was interrupted, payments to vendors delayed, cash receipts from customers not deposited,  invoices to customers not sent, internal customer list released to the public, etc.  All of these things and many more are dangers that exist when outsourcing your critical business functions to any outsourcing vendor.

Remember that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

Many outsourcing software vendors charge their customers on a “per user” basis.  “You can have all of the power of our software for ONLY $9.99 per month” is a common refrain.  It’s a loss leader.  Once you sign up for the basics you can be charged additional dollars for things like custom reports, additional backups, data downloads, telephone support, additional storage, additional bandwidth usage, “add ins” for additional functionality, upgrades, integration, data uploads and many many more items.

There are too many other dangers to outsourcing and giving up control of your business processes and data to an outside organization, just to gain a temporary dollar savings.

Protect yourself

If you are considering outsourcing or already involved with an outsourcing vendor please keep these basics in mind when evaluating any outsourcing issues:

1. Conduct a thourough initial due diligence and ongoing contract compliance effort
2. Conduct a comprehensive ROI analysis to ensure that the outsourcing budget truly involves long term savings over inhouse processing
3. Involve finance in the process to evaluate the vendor’s financial viability
4. Engage experts who know the outsourcing providers and have experience evaluating their offerings
5. Have a backup plan for any process that’s outsourced (another vendor, inhouse resources, etc.)
6. Have an outsourcing expert review the contract in addition to the legal department
7. Establish ongoing success metrics for accountability that are easily measured on a regular basis
8. Have an exit plan ready before you sign the initial contract (in particular, how can you get your data back if you terminate)
9. Use common business sense!

Now what?

Not all outsourcing vendors are bad.  Outsourcing can be beneficial in the right circumstances if you take the right steps to protect yourself and your company.  Follow the nine step process above when looking at new outsourcing options and please remember “Buyer Beware”!

In the wake of Hurricane Ike, 97% of all Houston homes and businesses were without power. That is effectively 7.8 million people. It is estimated that most businesses were without power for an average of 10 days. Can your business afford to be down for 10 days? Is ten days long enough for your customers to find another source for goods and services? Is your business so mission critical to others that even one day is unacceptable? For most businesses, unless you are an ambulance service or home medical care provider, this is not the case. However, criticality is not the only reason for many companies to recover as quickly as possible. Other factors such as goodwill, community service, customer loyalty, value, spoilage, and expenses can determine an organization’s desired recovery time.

In my business, I deal mostly with information technology so data security and recovery are my top concerns. But disaster recovery is more than how fast can you recover data from an offsite storage site or how quickly your cash registers can restart. It is about business continuity. It’s about how quickly you can get back to business as usual, or close to it.

Most executives cite security and recovery as one of their top three priorities. In my experience about 80% of companies either don’t have a disaster recovery (DR) plan, have an outdated one, or have never tested their DR plan. This isn’t as illogical as it sounds. Many organizations create a DR plan as a direct result of having gone through a disaster. Some companies never experience a disaster. Some experience a threat of disaster once every 5-10 years. A few actually experience a disaster and chalk it up to luck (or lack thereof) or nature. A disaster doesn’t have to be a category 4 hurricane. It could be a fire (Brenan’s as a recent example), a power outage, or lots of rain.

The largest worldwide Disaster Recovery planning event was centered around the anticipated problems caused by changing the two numbers of the year (from 99 to 00) when we moved into the year 2000 from 1999.  Many systems were upgraded and replaced as a result of effective DR planning and most of the problems were averted.  Without the worldwide effort associated with those plans and their implementation a worldwide infrastructure crises would have occurred and most of the worlds’ systems would have been inoperable.

When planning for disaster recovery, we consider the following key points. First is safety, the safety of your employees, your customers, your contractors, and your suppliers. An easy thing to accomplish is drawing up a phone tree and sharing it with your employees.
<p>Next have a plan for people that are already at work and those who are due to report to work. Do you tell people not to show up? Or can they do their work from home? Can you setup an offsite location away from harm’s way?

Third, protect your assets. This could be inventory, data, or intellectual property. If you have refrigerated products, what’s the best way to prevent spoilage? Do I need a generator? If you have time, where can you move your inventory to? Can your supplier hold your inventory? Is your data backed up and stored offsite? How quickly can that be recovered? Do you have a mirrored environment at another location? Are ideas and research protected?

Get a reality check. You can’t plan for everything…The key is to be better prepared than your customers.

And then there is loss of revenue to consider. What can I do to continue sales and services? How do I serve my customers without power, phone, transportation, etc…? What are my basic needs? One of our clients had forms for taking orders by hand in case their computers were down. Sounds simple but it worked
Can I relocate my operations temporarily? Another client was a mortgage company in South Florida with customers nationwide. There was a hurricane in Miami but the homeowner in Phoenix still wanted to close on their home. Some of the paperwork was shifted to the Tempe office.

This all sounds good but planning for an off chance that a disaster might debilitate your business could be costly. Consider the cost versus benefits. If it costs you $100,000 to have backup power that would keep your coolers cold and cash registers open until power is back up and you would only lose $10,000 in beer and hot dogs sales for the shutdown period.  If you had to shut down for only a day, you might not want to go with that plan. However, if that $10,000 in actual revenue loss could mean the loss of 100 customers to the convenience store across the street, resulting in $300,000 annual loss, you might want to reconsider.

Lastly, get a reality check. You can’t plan for everything. Even if you could, let’s say your store is hurricane proof, flood proof, fire proof, powered 24/7 no matter what and you’re not a data center, what are the chances that your customers are in the same boat and wouldn’t be able to visit the store anyway? The key is to be better prepared than your customers. Galveston is a prime example. Everyone had to evacuate. Restaurants, gas stations, department stores. Even emergency crews had to hunker down for 10 hours as the storm waged around them. The trick is that after it’s all over, be ready when your customers are ready. Home Depot opened for business with plenty of flash lights, cleaning supplies, and bug spray the day after everyone was allowed back on the island. How did they do that? An excellent DR plan, great distribution system, management with foresight, and employees willing to work hard.

I tell my clients, large or small, that all businesses should have a disaster recovery plan. I use the analogy of a family safety plan. In case of fire, where are the escape routes in your home? What should you grab if you have 30 seconds to leave your home? If you have a two story home and the downstairs is on fire, how do you get out of the house? (If you don’t have a family safety plan, please, please start one now.) And like family safety plans, you have to communicate that plan. Share your DR plan with your people, your organization.

The difference between having a Disaster Recovery plan and not having one could mean be the difference between being in business or in the unemployment line.

There are a host of social networks out there. One of the first to be popular was MySpace. Like the Internet in its infancy, MySpace was free to grow and evolve. Unfortunately, also like the early Internet, there wasn’t much monitoring and regulation. When child exploitation and social bullying were traced back to MySpace, the industry became more cautious and self-regulating. Facebook and LinkedIn followed, with more security and controls in place. Still, the user experience depended on the users themselves and their ability to be discriminate when uploading certain content. There are other flavors of social networks such as Naymz (reputation network) and Plaxo (contact management). But in the end, these networks accomplished what they set out to do, which is to make connecting people easy.

Businesses should take advantage of these facilitated introductions to a new population of prospects that leverage the existing personal relationship. It’s a virtual referral program. It’s a new marketing channel. It is PR on a viral platform. In this case, the spread of the virus is deliberate and hopefully productive. When coupled with other social network technologies such as Twitter and Digg, your message can be perpetuated to a network of social networks, thus creating a macro-cosmic audience. There is very little investment except for time and the technology footprint for businesses is very low or almost non-existent. There are some security concerns but most have been or are being addressed. Before adding any applications to your website or network check with your systems administrator.

Then Twytter (Type Whatever You’re Thinking To Everyone Reading) away!