When I wrote about automation back in March, I made my husband out to be an automation guru. He certainly is, but what you don’t know about my husband is that, although he loves to automate everything in his life, sometimes he drops the ball. He’s human. On the other hand, instances of hypocrisy in his behavior tend to make for a good story. So here we are again.
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On paying bills
When we married five years ago and began combining our bank accounts, I learned a few things about my husband. Because he loves automation, it came as no surprise to me that all his accounts resided in a single online repository (mint.com), which allowed him to view his net worth—assets such as his home and car value, debts including the loan left on his home, and bills and credit card expenses that needed to be paid. He’d also made sure to automate the payment of all loans, utility bills, and credit cards; the respective accounts would notify him when a payment was made. This online platform served as one dashboard view of all his accounts, eliminating the need to access them independently to see statements and make payments. It was genius!
He could set up savings goals, budgets, email alerts for credit card payment reminders and notification of payment, suspicious account activity, and just about any other miscellaneous charge, activity, or change in spending habits. It really did make life easier.
Until I entered the picture.
On marriage
We married, I synched my bank accounts, and we combined cash. I scoured his historical data to observe spending habits to find areas where we could save money. As I began poking around his accounts, I noticed that he was being charged a monthly fee from his Chase Freedom Visa credit card. I asked him about the fee; he pleaded ignorance. When I investigated further, I discovered that he’d been charged this fee for years, from when he first got the credit card.
I researched online and discovered that other cardholders had complained about being erroneously enrolled in a protection program when they first got their Chase Freedom card, and were being charged a similar fee of varying amounts. It turns out this monthly fee was a percentage of monthly spending—and the Chase Freedom Visa credit card incentivized a cardholder to make all his or her purchases with that card, given its offer of 5-percent cash back on all purchases at the time.
Needless to say, I wanted that money back. We were quickly on the phone with Chase disputing the program enrollment and monthly charges. They acknowledged their error and refunded us the money lost over a span of several years.
The lesson in all of this? Marry someone who’s not afraid to dig through your historical data.
On alert systems
More seriously, automating processes or workflows is incredibly helpful, but without the proper attention and alert systems in place, you may still encounter holes in the story. Automation and alerts must go hand-in-hand to be effective. As a consumer of the information you’re automating, you still must be invested enough to look at the big picture.
For my husband, the beauty in automating his bill payments and aggregating all his accounts in one online repository was to save time he’d otherwise spend paying bills separately and checking cash flow in multiple accounts. However, he failed to set up alerts about important aspects of the process he was automating, and he failed to check in on his process from time to time. Mint.com provides an incredibly useful dashboard to give you the big-picture overview of your accounts and your net worth; it also provides a plethora of alert options that save a consumer time from digging for red flags after an undesirable event has become a regular occurrence in the process (like I did). But without checking the status of the system or using its full automation potential, the system is only as good as its inputs.
This is just one piece of the puzzle. Alert systems offer so much more:
• Awareness. Setting alerts for miscellaneous fees would have offered insight about the credit card program my husband had been erroneously enrolled in.
• Immediate feedback. The first time a fee was charged, he would have been able to take immediate action rather than waiting years for his wife to discover the charge (manually, mind you).
• Time savings. Aside from automating bill pay and combining all accounts into a single repository for a big picture view of one’s financial status (which is certainly a time-saver), an alert system would have saved me a lot of time in digging through my husband’s financial data to understand the origin of the fee Chase was charging him.
• Money savings. Although we were refunded all the money charged in monthly fees by Chase, clearly an alert system would have been a more foolproof way to save money in the first place. Alerts are also effective in ensuring that bill pay occurs on time, notifying you when a statement has been prepared, when the bill is due, and when the bill has been paid.
As process engineers or quality managers in the manufacturing world, you are very close to your process and its inputs. You want to know when something goes wrong, as soon as it happens. You don’t want a consumer to discover a flaw in a part or product you manufactured and sold years before, only to be faced with product recalls, customer reimbursements, time and money invested to re-manufacture and replace the defective product for unhappy customers, and in some cases, lawsuits. The stakes are high.
Minitab offers a solution to this pain point in its Real-Time SPC dashboard. The dashboard is completely powered by Minitab Statistical Software, taking the graphs and output you know and love and placing them on customized dashboard views that show the current state of your processes. The dashboard gives you a big picture view of your processes across all your production sites, for instance, and highlights where improvements can be made. You can incorporate any graph or analysis you want—such as histograms, control charts, or process capability analysis. You can automatically generate quality reports about your processes, and set up any alert that will help you respond to defects faster.
In the case of my marriage, alert systems are certainly practical from a financial standpoint. But in the world of manufacturing, ensuring alerts are set up around your automated processes has far-reaching implications, as the time- and money-saving elements of alert systems greatly affect a company’s bottom line.
Comments
credit card charges
It would seem to me, (the un-automated one) that if the credit card bills were checked each month for erroneous charges by the company or by a theif, it would have been discovered much earlier. My wife takes care of that now, but without a review, one could end up being taken for quite a ride. We don't have a Chase Card, but it can happen with any card issuer, one has to take their own financial health in their own hands.
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