Swivel chairs are popular in many offices, workplaces, and rooms in the home. A swivel chair is a spinny, revolving chair. It’s also a way to describe inefficient processes and opportunities for automation in business process management. In this brief article, we go through what a swivel chair is in the context of a business.
What is a swivel chair in business operations?
A swivel chair process describes any business workflow or task where you need to manually enter the same data into different systems. This term can also relate to various types of chairs, including swivel chairs, stationary chairs, and accent chairs, which are often used in office settings. Eliminating swivel chair activity from your business processes reduces manual work, creates efficiencies, improves operational excellence, and allows employees to rest more. The swivel chair metaphor comes from the office setting, where you could imagine physically turning from one activity to another in your swivel chair as you repeat manual tasks. Recent research by ProcessMaker estimates that 10% of the time of an average business operations team is spent in swivel chair activities.
Reasons for swivel chair
Swivel chair processes are fairly common in the workplace but may be difficult to measure. These processes often require extra space for manual data entry and task management. Typically they involve legacy workflows or enterprise IT systems that require a high amount of manual data entry or tasks. Swivel chair processes can be as versatile as lounging in a comfortable chair, allowing for easy movement between tasks. Often swivel chair activities form over time when people implement more activities into a workflow or assignment. It may be common practice in areas like financial reporting or customer service where you need to toggle between different types of business applications to complete repetitive tasks. For example, in many shared services functions maintaining customer records between various ERP and CRM systems may require manual copy-paste when integrations have not been built between different systems.
