Texas Oil & Gas Magazine Vol 3. Issue 3 | Page 35

Leadership EXCEL-ence

Being a leader in your company implies that you are out in front of your business. The brute force method is to go with your experience or gut, and then bust your assets to make it happen: “This type of job usually takes 2-4 days, so I’ll bid it at 3 and tell the supervisor to make it happen.” But with the power of Excel, you can know exactly how much time, materials, and effort the job should take based on many different factors. Excel can do a lot more than the average person or even the average company knows how to use. I’m not an IT guy; I’m just a practical get-it-done guy who tries to use the tools at hand with a little finesse. Consider this possible approach:

The KEY to Leadership EXCEL-ence is automatically storing the key details of each job to the Job History Workbook. This gives you the power to analyze the past for money saving opportunities and to more accurately predict the future when estimating jobs. And if you have multiple sites, this is how you get immediate visibility to how the whole business is doing with automated customized dashboards. You let the reports identify the differences so your teams push each other rather than you pushing them.

But Shouldn’t I Invest in a ‘Cloud’ System?

Business growth is a progression: there is no One-Size-Fits-All business solution for the entire spectrum. For the start-up, the pen and paper and brute force method can work. For a giant, a customized cloud-based system is probably not only a good idea, but essential. But in-between, Excel can give the best bang for the buck for two reasons:

1)Excel allows you to be flexible while you grow. Simple spreadsheets can be easily modified by properly trained users, or locked-down with passwords and macros to provide consistency and reliability once you are comfortable with your level of information.

2)Cloud solutions usually involve a tedious and expensive initial setup if you want any customization at all, and the learning curve can be steep if you buy a standard package and have to do it their way.

And one more:

3)Export to Excel. When you want to look at all your Cloud data in a new way, dumping the data to Excel is the typical solution the Cloud guys will offer. Either that, or you pay them the big bucks to crunch the data for you, or better yet, subscribe to the Premium package and be inundated with reports that you don’t need to get the ones you do.

For most of us, if we ask one of the gurus to bring the Cloud down to our level, we just end up lost in the Fog.

Here is how I see the value attainable by the three levels of sophistication discussed so far:

Where to start?

First, consider how much time your people spend pushing paper and copying numbers between spreadsheets. How often do they make annoying little mistakes? What would you do now if you had that information which will take all day for someone to work up for you?

By Bruce A. Stanfill, Aquila Analytics, LLC.

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