End To End Business Process Improvement In Less Than 14 Days by:David Birchall
Successful Business owners and senior managers share an efficiency mindset
. In everything they do, they seek the most cost effective method and look to maximize ROI at every stage. Following on from the Global Financial crisis, managers have been put under unprecedented pressure to lean up their business and every cent of every dollar of expenditure has been put under scrutiny. This flurry of cost reduction activity has caused some senior managers to focus heavily on the dollars being saved and pay less attention to the businesses operational effectiveness that is being sacrificed as a consequence. In these managers, their mindset has moved from doing more with less to one of one of simply survival.The survival mindset is all about doing what it takes to ride out the drop off in customer demand, balance the books and maintain sufficient cash flow and funding. Sadly, this is typically done through brute force reduction in staff count and/or business processes and systems.
The biggest problem with finding yourself in this mindset is that sooner or later when the economy does turnaround, your business needs to be effective enough to survive the feeding frenzy that will ensue. It may be attractive to cut suppliers or reduce your headcount now but what does that do for your operational effectiveness? These managers fail to ask themselves if their business is really capable of reacting to a spike in demand?
Managers are therefore on the lookout for cost reduction strategies that can save money now but have more long term operational effectiveness.
One area that CFOs and COOs look for cost savings are business process improvements initiatives. By analyzing the processes in a business and re-engineering them, substantial cost savings can be realized and in the process, make the business more effective and agile.
The benefits of Business process improvements are well known and acknowledged but they are largely thought about as long term initiatives. Most CFOs view business process improvement initiatives as an exercise that will take a minimum of 6 months to implement and its not uncommon for projects to blow out to two or even three years. In this current economic climate, many C level executives are overly focused on short term initiatives and rule out business process engineering before they have really had a chance to consider it.
Whilst these decisions are often based on experience and were previously common sense, modern day approaches have moved on. This means that all too often opportunities are missed in the haste to get things done.
Business Process engineering simply doesnt have to take this long. Modern days consulting houses such as Synoptic document, analyse and re-engineer a business process in only 2 4 days. Exactly, how they do this is beyond the scope of this article but the time-frame involved is what is most important to understand. Essentially its about applying the full process only to the areas that need it. Remember the old 80/20 rule?
Next, having established our to be processes a vehicle is needed to operationalise the changes. Again, based on previous experience C level executives perceive software implementations as both longwinded and a costly affair and sadly some of the best intentioned projects never see the light of day.
Software development has moved on in leaps and bounds in recent times which means that C Level executives need to takes a revised view of what is possible with modern software development toolsets.
One such toolset is SEBA from Solentive. Rather than start from scratch with each new development, a licensed version of their software development chassis is made available. This means that timeframe and budgets for the implementation of new business processes are reduced with dramatic effect.
A tool set is made available to Managers or business process owners to allow them to build or modify business processes as they change. What the manager perceives as a business process in their management application is viewed as a series of screens for the end user at the shop floor level.
Further more, through a powerful combination of workflow and business rules engine technology, SEBA can guide the user to make more cost effective decisions at decision points along the path of the process.
By combining the best of both of these approaches, C Level executives could potentially move from mapping to implementation of business processes in less than 14 days. This can be very attractive to a manager who is looking to refine business processes and see a rapid return on their investment.
Whatever decisions you make in your endeavors to reduce costs, its goes without saying that you need to be armed with of all of the facts before going ahead. The consequences of these decisions must be measured, calculated or quantified. As they say, in order to work out where youre heading you first of all need to know where you are now!
The reality for many businesses is that they dont have those vital reporting metrics available. There is only one way to break this cycle of course and that is to capture what you have got so far and start collecting baseline data. Combined with a Continuous Process improvement approach you should start to see far reaching measureable results very quickly.
More business technology articles by David Birchall can be discovered at http://www.davidbirchall.bircko.com
About the author
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