Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes - Leveraging Existing Tools

Talked about business applications/process at Stanford and how the mice were very hard at work in the background working overtime to keep up. Lack of automation and process will not serve Stanford in the future and make it very difficult to scale to remote locations such as NYC. Easy to find examples of which the following were discussed:
- Pat has been approached with needs for applicant tracking tools for summer school students, postdocs, etc. Today, most of this is being done manually by staff and students via paper hardcopy.
- Petty Cash - Expense Reimbursement - need to fill out hardcopy form, hand off for signature, hand off for process, sign more paperwork and some manually distributes the cash.
- Supply chain management - discussed needed for management of inventory in the labs - LBRE outsource model is working for facility inventory management, why are we not scaling this to other needs.
Proposed the following plan of action:
1) Select one business process that is a good candidate for improvement
2) Create business proposal/business case
3) Get funding
4) Implement
5) Reinvest savings in continued business improvement of other processes.
Next step: Schedule meeting with Sam Steinhardt to advise on strategy to move this forward.