The Devil is in the Details: A Parable of ONE KEYSTROKE

Steve McNair of FTP Consulting tells a great story about how a credit card processing company made a significant $$$ investment in system upgrades, which delivered “lower performance”. The customer blamed the solution provider — however, the system was running fine. Sound familiar?

After nine months of working with the system, no one could identify the root cause of the decreased productivity. The mystery continued…

None of the workflow adjustments had any impact.

The vendor sent a team of technicians to test the hardware and software for flaws or errors. After a week of testing, the vendor’s team reported that there weren’t any problems with the system.

The customer continued to experience lower throughput. The customer was convinced that it wasn’t a management, workflow or staff issue and it had to be a problem with the system or hardware.

Sounds like a collision course with litigation — and, in fact, the customer was about ready to pull the trigger on legal action until the vendor suggested a third party analysis. That’s when they learned that it was indeed the confluence of single extra keystroke, the economy, and a change in payment mix that were causing their problems…

What made that extra keystroke necessary? It would not be fair to Mr. McNair to give it away because we want you to read his story, suffice to say that, as the article’s title proclaims, the devil is indeed in the details.

Extra data entry and keying is something which should pretty much “go away” with the industry’s best check automation platforms. There are capabilities available today which enable any workflow to attain virtually 100% automation.  This would circumvent these environmental variables which negatively affect overall performance.