Ask HN: Have you ever saved your employer big money through simple change?
I work in an office and I have to lock my machine when I go away from my desk. 15 minutes after I lock my machine a screensaver kicks in showing all things bank related and after a further half hour the monitor goes into standby. One morning, after being horribly hungover, I noticed that in my vicinity around 25 machines all had screensavers on (the team adjacent to mine were in a meeting). This got me to thinking how much money and energy was being wasted by screensavers alone.
So after speaking to some people and doing various presentations (it's amazing how convulated the process is to change something simple!) it was agreed the company branded screen saver was to be replaced for a blank one (this was needed to ensure the machine was put into lock mode) and monitor standby initiated 44 minutes earlier than the original configuration. This saves 44 minutes of power at 35 watts, where previously the monitor would display a company branded screen saver. With over 100,000 desktops in the estate, this saved energy costs when the PC is not in use in the region of £75k p.a.
From a technical perspective this was a simple, low risk change to implement and was delivered on time and with zero budget (aside from platform development man hours).
I wondered if anyone else had saved money through simple change? If you work for a large company you may also want to ask the question 'do we need a screensaver'!
Would love to hear some of the ways you have saved money for your company!
79 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadA good UX developer are worth their weight in gold, it is just hard to get people to recognize the difference between an HTML designer and a UX professional that works with metrics, focus groups and A/B testing. They see 40hr for a designer and 200hr for a UX developer and they go with the designer. When in reality they are separate and complimentary disciplines.
Saving a company money is saving them money, it is a great quality to have. I admire efficiency more than almost any other business trait.
Using a web app I developed, I suggested removing these numbers from all public sites and advising customers to call the help desk for them. You'd be surprised how much pushing I had to do and how much resistance I faced, especially since I was working in the marketing dept.
Anyway, they finally implemented my idea. Total fraud for 2009 was approx. 300k. For 2010, its approx. 50k.
Several consultants had came in and told the CEO that there was no way to graduate out of the system, that it would require a total rewrite of the system. The CEO had went through 3 failed attempts to build a new system with external vendors the second of which folded shop and then the CEO got a call from an Indian company saying that they had been working on the system for over a year and had not goten paid. Apparently the front company that folded was subbing everything to offshore firms without letting the customer know.
Anyway, all attempts failed and the one most critical business issue was that the rates and allotments for hotel rooms needed to be available to customers like Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Expedia in real time. It was a read only problem. I set up an export from fox-pro to a database cluster (I can't ever remember which one now (Oracle or MSSQL). Built some web services on top of it to expose the data and published the WSDL. All tolled we (2 people full time) spent a week building the services and added over 30 million in revenue, the first year. I have done some others, but that is probably my best time to money ratio of my career.
http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/LBLD.htm
I was pointing out the mistake because I found it to be a very interesting mistake — as I hope is conveyed in the link I gave — nestling in your otherwise exemplary written English. In fact, it caused me to momentarily question whether it was I who had got that idiom wrong for all these years.
Due to the generic nature of some of their keywords, the display network wasn't working for them, none of their users would find them on a mobile, and the timing of their visitors is very 9-5 to name a few of the changes I made.
These specific changes were simple, common sense Adwords settings that many users gloss over or do not address.
My biggest effect on the company was when I dove into their keywords, setup conversion tracking and adjusting the site for lead conversion. I doubled leads, halved conversion costs, etc.
I've since gone through their campaigns granularly and doubled their leads.
So several business departments and the IT department entered into a series of long debates about whether to spend time adding extra functionality to the homegrown search or to just upgrade to something like Google Custom Search / Google Search Appliance -- both options that would have taken a long time, given the bureaucracy at the organization.
Meanwhile, in looking at the site's logfile analyses, I noticed that the analysis software they were using was really good at letting you see stats on GET queries in URLs. A quick look at the HTML for the site's search form revealed that the form was using POST.
I suggested to the IT dept that they simply change the search form to use GET instead of POST and call it a day. Done.
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-wrong-tracking-c...
The client had just had a customer service issue where one of their customers discovered many months later that her card was still being charged for her subscription even though the card had expired. She didn't know that many cards continue to work after they expire, and had never bothered to cancel her account.
So the client wanted me to make sure that we don't charge expired cards in the future. As far as I knew, this was the first time the issue had come up in the more than a year since we switched payment gateways, so I generated some new reports, and it turns out they had charged almost $4,000 to expired cards just in the previous month. Some of those customers would correct their card data if we notified them, but the reality of subscription businesses is that there's a lot of inertia involved. It's safe to say that the client would simply lose a fair portion of those dollars every month if we stopped charging expired cards with active subscriptions. Much better to refund the one customer/year who complains that they thought an expired card meant they unsubscribed than to forgo all that revenue. Of course they agreed and we didn't make the change.
FTR, this is the same client that a few months ago was complaining that I was the only programmer they'd ever worked with who bills them for email and phone conversations. I'll be reminding them of this case if it ever comes up again.
Otherwise... A guy that entices his customers to rip-off their customers. Plus he charges for emails written and phone calls made. You make me proud actually you'd make a fine CEMEA CEO!
It's a service--like most other consumer subscription services--where if customers have to take action to keep their subscription going, you're more likely to lose those customers than if they only have to take action if they want to cancel.
My belief is that (1) when people's cards expire, many people don't bother to update their card information in every single place they have a subscription and (2) most people who want to cancel will actually cancel and not just count on their card's expiration date to do it for them. Since we've had just one complaint in more than a year (on the order of 0.1% of number of charges we've made on past-expiration cards), I think my beliefs are justified.
And charging for time spent writing email to or for a client and consulting on the phone sounds scummy to you?
Relying on revenue that will come in only if your customers "forget" to cancel their subscriptions is just bad business IMHO.
You see I have learned in my life that going an extra mile bears an unfathomable premium - as long as your product is actually required.
The same goes for emails and calls - If the email is a product itself (what they require of your services) then by all means - You're not supposed to work for free are you? But then again we don't say "I sold five emails today".
Of course you bill your customer for email and phone, you price it into your hourly rate, product price... whatever. But you don't go out and show it to them on balance. Whatever you have gained in transparency - you have lost on the grounds of appearing cheap or tight. This too I see as bad form.
In fact with gas providers (or at least my own) are required to keep service running even in the presence of events which might normally trigger a cancel in other commercial contexts (customer in default for multiple months, not reachable or even apparently "dead" according to public records, etc). At least until the warm season starts.
Magazine subscriptions are at least in grey area, as far as this goes.
Members can easily cancel the service any time, but they have to actually cancel. If we cancelled everyone with an old card we'd be hassling a lot more people than we'd be helping.
Also, "expired cards" are not the same as "expired accounts."
I just think it's at least an ethical area, given that it seems not to be common knowledge that cards can continued to be billed even after the card expires; and given that consumer magazine subscriptions are, in the vast majority of cases, highly discretionary, i.e. fluff purchases (as opposed to things like utility service, medical prescriptions, etc, for which the exact opposite stance should apply, as far as this goes).
BTW, a good barometer for the fact that it's at least a grey area issue is that (in the original case here) the company would readily refund that one customer who _took the trouble to complain_ about the post-expiration charges, indicating that on a very basic level, they understood well enough that that customer was being short-changed, or not dealt with in an above-board fashion.
So if you're willing to recognize that a customer has been short-changed if they take the trouble to complain -- why not (other than the short-term profit motive) do so, proactively, for all customers who fall into that same "gotcha" situation?
I just feel that in grey area cases, companies should err on, you know, "doing the right thing" as opposed to (short-term) profit maximization -- especially as doing the right thing has a way of paying greater, long-term dividends.
So at the very least, they can at least _attempt_ to notify the customer that the card has expired, and that it is their policy to continue to keep billing for that subscription unless told otherwise.
- We upgraded our hardware and our forecasting software vendor wanted a one time $600,000 charge. I convinced my boss to replace them with in-house written software. Took 6 weeks to write.
- Our 400 worker factory was $30,000 under-absorbed per month. I wrote both standard costing and data collection software. Supervisors compared the standards to the actuals to discover where they were losing money. We were over-absorbed by $30,000 per month 6 months later.
- We budgeted over $1 million for a new ERP system to "solve all of our problems". I helped others solve most of their problems by identifying them and coming up with solutions from the existing software. We never did buy new software.
- (My favorite). Our HCFA feed from the U.S. Government was broken and no one knew why. I dug in and changed 1 byte of code (1 byte, not 1 line). The next day, our bank account had $6.5 million more in it. I never had the heart to tell them how easy it was to fix.
That's just gangsta. Can you expand on that last story? I can't wrap my head around such a simple problem costing so much.
Seems like you have a real eye for this type of thing!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811500
I work primarily on software that's being used pretty heavily in business. There are opportunities everywhere, if you only bother to look. To me, "hacking the business" is even more fun that "hacking the code".
Consumer startups: Build something people want.
Enterprise startups: Hack the business.
One day we started receiving a massive flood of calls all about the same problem: the default ISP homepage wouldn't load, and people thought their internet was broken. The call queue was growing exponentially, and no one could figure out what was wrong. This went on for a few hours, with no solution in sight.
Long story short, while troubleshooting with one of these customers, I found the source of the problem (a new firewall setting in the ISP's free av/fw package), reported it to my supervisor, and a fix was quickly implemented.
Given the volume of calls and the size of their subscriber base, I probably saved the ISP at least 5 digits in phone fees, and got a lot of angry customers off their back.
For my efforts, I was rewarded with a company branded pen.
And I bet the person who approved the push out of that av/fw package had nothing come back on them, right?
With a five-line change, $250k/yr was saved (you don't have to remit sales taxes for money you never received).
With a five-line change, $250k/yr was saved (you don't have to remit sales taxes for money you never received).
Their test-tracking and defect-tracking process required essentially reading data off of a machine and re-entering it; I figured out how to scrape the data from the terminal and use GUI automation to populate the appropriate fields at the click of button. This saved several hours per person per week over 40-50 people.
I wrote a simple CRM web app in my spare time, which every salesperson in the company just loved. It enabled them to see each client's history with a single click.
I asked for a bonus, the manager waved me aside saying "sure, build it and I'll give you $100". I never saw an extra dime other than the $5/hr I was making (I probably earned them thousands in sales that would otherwise be lost, not to mention productivity). They still use the system to this day.
That way you bootstrap a startup, get a paying customer, they get dedicated development (initially) centred around them and you don't have to work for $5/hr.
For some reason, fixing this situation was not a terribly high priority for those in charge. Someone did create a crash reporter that emailed a stack dump plus any user comments to a central email address. The quota for that account was soon full.
I decided to spend an hour or two here or there on going through the crash dumps. Within a week or so, I'd fixed the bugs causing 99% of the crashes. After rolling that out, we were still getting tens of crashes a day. Fixing 90% of those was pretty easy, too. When I left the company, we were getting maybe 2 crashes a week.
As you can probably imagine, this made me rather popular among some of the artists and designers.
The editor was fairly ancient, they'd been using it for well over 5 years. I can't begin to imagine how much effort was lost in total.
Incidentally, that sequence of events also cured my fear of large, horrible code bases. This thing was written using a proprietary extension library to MFC plus some creative use of DirectX. I think the only code that can scare me now are life-or-death systems.
I knew a little trick from my days in the school Mac Lab. I would have the customer flip the power switch, wait ten seconds, then flip it off and back on again (not too quickly). Often I would have the customer stand up and spin around or some other humorous ruse before the second step. The Macintosh would boot up and work fine. I would order a new motherboard battery ($2.50) and the retailer would pay 75 bucks for a tech to go install it. Still much cheaper than what they were doing before.
The spikes were often enough to push the 95th percentile up to an absurd amount. I spent a few days making some changes to make all updates incremental and ended up saving the company about $50k/mo in bandwidth charges.