Following is Tom’s bio;

Thanks to all who attended!

An increase in cost for Guest dinners will be determined at a later date.

If you own a company, a significant portion of your time is spent on figuring out ways to improve your business's bottom line. One way to do that is through process improvement. For each division in your company, you will want someone to go through and analyze each process that occurs, in order to tighten it and get rid of redundancies and extraneous actions. One way to accomplish this rather daunting task is to take advantage of the visual capabilities of Microsoft Visio. Visio drawing is just what you need to help your business save money through process improvement.

Viso templates are designed to use with processes that occur repeatedly in any business. The Visio software package integrates these templates for you to use with Visio drawings and customize to your company's specific needs. Whether you wish to utilize business process flowcharts, software diagrams, workflow diagrams, network diagrams, or database models, you will find templates for all of these on Visio. You can then use these templates to plug your business's unique information into the drawings to help you create a picture of how a particular system operates. This, in turn, will allow you to visually represent your business processes, track projects and resources used, even map networks and organizations. By seeing all of the information represented, you will be able to critically analyze the information in order to optimize your systems.

One significant way to optimize all of your business's systems is to analyze the information to identify trends. Because Microsoft Visio is compatible with other Microsoft software programs, such as Excel, you can take information from Excel spreadsheets and easily put it into visual form by using Visio. You can use a Visio drawing to compare and contrast information from one quarter to another, or one year to another, quickly. It can take a long time to read all of the text to ascertain the information that can come in the form of a picture that can be understood at a glance. Because of this, not only can Visio help you streamline operations, but it can save you time as well. Having this visual knowledge at your fingertips is powerful, because it gives you the data you need to make necessary adjustments to improve your company's processes, with an end result of saving you money.

Another important benefit that comes from using a Visio drawing to communicate information in your company is when you need to share information interdepartmentally. Someone from a different department might not have the in-depth knowledge and command of the jargon used in your department, and this could lead in a breakdown in understanding the ideas you are trying to communicate. A Visio drawing can say in one picture what many spreadsheets full of numbers and jargon can take pages to relate, in a way that someone without your technical expertise can nevertheless understand your information. Knowledge is power, and knowing how to tighten your business processes can help your business succeed.