You know the scenario, you go to take your smartphone headphones out your pocket and then spend the next 2 minutes untangling them. Have you ever wondered why that is, even though you neatly looped them when you pocketed them? They are hardly ever completely untangled as you left them. This is because the universe has a rather irritating property that means it is always heading towards disorder and chaos. Its real and its called entropy.
To explain further here is a quick experiment…
Fill a jam jar half with yellow sand and then top up with red sand. So you have 2 layers: yellow and red. Now, stir with a spoon in clockwise direction 10 times and you will expectedly see that the yellow and red grains merge into a more orangey mixture of sand.
Now, with the same spoon stir 10 times in an anticlockwise direction and what do you see? Obviously, it just stirs the mixture up even more: It doesn’t reverse the mixing. But why doesn’t it return the jar contents to be 2 layers of yellow and red sand?
The answer is that there are more combinations and permutations of disordered grains of sand than there is of ordered grains of sand. That’s entropy. That’s what the universe and consequently our daily lives experience all the time. In fact, it increases with time unless you do something about it!
Taming your Business data
When running a business there are many things going on whether it be ensuring that your operations are running efficiently, your invoicing and VAT returns are correct, finding the right suppliers. It’s endless. It’s also very dynamic and changeable.
Having the right applications, systems and procedures in place are key to prevent chaos and inaccuracies and to promote efficiencies and continued progress.
At Bullet Web Development we have a track record of improving business efficiencies for our clients whether they are handling student admissions from UCAS, managing the lifetime and creation of insurance policies, enabling the complex booking of ski transfers to tracking apprenticeship programmes or the complete management of a recruitment business workflow.
In many of these cases, our clients were working with spreadsheets, pen and paper or other unsuitable systems that didn’t really fit their requirements. The introduction of a new online application in each of these examples has resulted in significant improvements year on year in their operations, reporting, and general throughput. Manual process processes are fraught with mistakes and errors. Humans are very good at increasing entropy!
Without the right business system, increased chaos will be allowed to take hold and make everything else much harder to achieve your goals and targets.
The main tenet behind this is that anything that can be automated should be automated. Whether that be the generation of a PDF invoice, the download of a financial CSV/XLSX, the management of complex data, or the integration of your system with a supplier’s or customer’s system.
