Is your business suffering from CRUD

About ten years ago, Fram oil filters ran an ad saying "Pay me now or pay me later". The basis for this ad is that if you don't change your oil filter regularly, you will build up CRUD in your engine and need major engine repairs.

This saying has a lot of meaning in many areas. If you plan, you will avoid future problems, but this is something we often ignore. There are too many fires to fight to worry about planning.

During a growth period, this is especially true. It is hard to focus on preventing an unknown future problem, when you have today's fires to fight.

Things are different in a recession. During a recession, you can't afford to waste time, resources or money. Your business operations are a good source of free time and wasted money.

As your business changes, the activities that you need to perform also change. You add new ones to satisfy the needs, but you seldom review all of the old ones that you were doing. Over time many of these activities become useless because of something else that is being done, but they continue anyway. This is the CRUD in your business engine.

Now is the time to eliminate the CRUD. When business slakens, your people are often less busy. They have time to look at business operations. When business picks up, you will be ready to increase volumes and your costs will be lower.

In most cases, companies don't think of buying software during recessions. They think of it during peak times, because they can't handle the volume. If you have already eliminated the CRUD, your software installation will be more successful. If you automate with the CRUD, it may cause you productivity problems, it will increase cost and may fail to reach your goal.