What is Streamline?
Post-it NotesEverything that happens and everything that needs to happen in your company is a task, and impacts on the organization at multiple levels. Whether it is
 
Bullet  an invoice being submitted;
Bullet  stock being ordered;
Bullet  a project being delegated or
Bullet  leave being allocated;
 
tasks are the cornerstone of your business. It stands to reason that, the more efficiently we get tasks done, the more efficient the business will become. But, how do we get people to get things done? The eternal $1 million question!  There must be more answers to that question than there are professors at business schools. Some will put it down to leadership - inspiring people, motivating them, enthusing them. The more cynical among us will tend to recommend checking up on them, watching them closely and pouncing when one steps out of line.  These become philosophies followed by many - depending on which is your favourite guru of the moment.  We, at Streamline, have come to believe that they are both right,and both wrong.  You need to be able to manage appropriately for the particular situation.  However, without good two way communication and a way of 'keeping track', your management style is irrelevant.

So, If we get task management right, the rest 

  • Time and Diary Management,
  • Document Management,
  • Project Management,
  • Operational or Workflow Management,
  • Reports and Quality Control,
  • Customer Relationship Management and
  • Enterprise Resource Planning / Management
will follow naturally. (Amazing how many names have been thought up that essentially mean - "Get people to do the right thing at the right time", isn't it?).

Streamline is, in its simplest form, a Task Scheduling System. It is a way of communicating tasks, assigning responsibility, negotiating target dates and enforcing feedback (or quality control). Streamline is perhaps better described as a way of getting things done, a workflow methodology or even a management philosophy, than a software application. The core of this methodology we call Task-Centric Communication.

For your business to grow, people need to coordinate their efforts, agree on how the work is to be divided and when it is to be done.  The successful completion of these tasks must be monitored and, should any deviation from the desired outcome occur, corrective action must be taken.
 
Streamline is a software tool, yet it is a lot more. Streamline is a way of managing your business. With Streamline your people will be able to coordinate and manage operations in such a way that ‘balls’ cannot be dropped, information is readily available and responsibility is always clearly defined. Streamline ties people, activities, documents, projects, systems, time and resources (and much more) together.

Streamline simply allocates tasks to a responsible person or department, while keeping the originating party (and all other stakeholders - even the customer) in the loop.  These tasks always return to the originator for acceptance, and, in this way, the quality control feedback loop becomes an integral part of your day to day operations.

With Streamline we ask (and require users to constanly ask) the following questions, which introduce the major features of the product: