Shawn Slavin

Taming the Chaos in Your Company:

Every company has a little chaos in their house. The level of impact it has on one’s business can vary wildly from company to company, but every business has it. It may be in the way you manage your employee recruiting and on-boarding, your warehouse may not be organized in a way that optimizes accessibility and flexibility, your purchase requisition and vendor invoice payment approval flow may be suffering, your month-end process may take days or weeks to complete, or your financial reporting process may be onerous and deliver results too late to be relevant.

Processes can be honed to maximum efficiency and still be wholly ineffective. Only when everyone is working towards the same goal can true effectiveness be reached. Effectiveness can be achieved when clear objectives are identified, constraints are understood, teams are properly equipped, and bottlenecks are overcome.

Successes:

Shawn has made a career of helping organizations achieve greater effectiveness with business process reengineering and appropriate technology.

An organization serving customers in the oil fields of Texas once ran afoul of the Texas Tax Commission for improperly calculating and collecting sales and gross receipts taxes. In the year prior to implementing systems leveraged by CS3, the customer incurred tax adjustments totaling over 2 million dollars. To ensure this would never happen again, Shawn and his team engrossed themselves in understanding the sales and gross receipts tax laws involved and then developed solutions to properly calculate the taxes due at the point of each transaction. This allowed the company to bill, collect, and report the proper amount of taxes, thus avoiding penalties and fines. To date, the system has been audited by the Texas Tax Commission and has resulted in no new tax adjustments.

A distributor who provides medical supplies to customers throughout the United States wanted to change systems. The provider refused to extend their SaaS contract while they transitioned from their current SaaS-based system without paying a fee of over $100,000. Shawn helped this organization accelerate a project implement a replacement system and increase its effectiveness in managing serialized inventory for proper product traceability. In addition, CS3 assisted in extracting years of transactional history from the retiring system to allow customer access for historical research purposes. All this was accomplished in under 90 days and resulted in annual savings of over $50,000 in application fees.

CS3 was approached by a tribal organization in Oklahoma to assist in stabilizing an accounting system implemented by another company. After addressing the underlying causes of the problem, CS3 entered into a relationship that lasted over 15 years. During that time the customer’s operations grew from 200 employees to over 2,500. The accounting department grew from 5 users to over 40. Shawn and his team were there to help them manage their systems to: support their growth in users and volumes, implement new applications to address new businesses operations such as retail and child care, add an Electronic Content Management System to automate approval workflows, implement an HRMS system to manage the explosive growth in its workforce, implement a campus-wide time and attendance system, and develop reporting and integration processes to provide management with the insight they needed to oversee the enterprise.

Shawn worked with a customer in the product testing industry with operations in 5 countries to improve their customer billing processes. We did this by working to integrate their internally developed operations management systems with a packaged accounting software system to gain overall operational effectiveness. A billing process that once required 3 days to complete was reduced to 4 hours. In addition, customers were offered the opportunity to receive invoices electronically and to enroll in automated invoice payments. These improvements reduced the number of days in accounts receivable by 18 days and freed up over 1.5 million dollars in working capital.


Credentials:

Co-founder and Vice President with the CS3 Group

Certified Public Accountant since 1987

Certified Information Technology Professional

Vice-Chairman of the Board for the Information Technology Alliance

Chartered Global Management Accountant since 2012

Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma