How Business Process Waste Kills Productivity
You've tried everything!
Business process improvement exercises, bought new software, restructured your department and retrenched employees.
But your productivity is still flat and costs just keep going up.
All the consultants you brought in promised that by using their systems, methods and tools, you'd see dramatic improvement. All you had to do was make your organisation fit the new system. Simple. But all you've seen is falling morale and dissatisfied clients.
Nothing works... but why not?
You've done everything the best minds in the industry told you to do. But change has been slow in coming, at best. Non-existent, at worst.
This is a common story. And it occurs because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of customer value.
Waste of a different form
Did you know that close to 60% of all work done in your service organisation adds no value to your client?
There's only one type of waste in a service organisation: work done that adds no value to your client. But the usual measures won't detect it, which explains your frustrations with all the help you've received so far...
Measuring service waste has nothing to do with throughput or internal efficiencies. Call centre call durations are the wrong measure and software solutions usually make things worse, not better.
Services, not manufacturing
You're most probably working in a service organisation, 85% of people do. And you'll know that service organisations are a special breed. You don't, and never will, produce anything. Except reports. Rather, you solve your clients' problems.
And it's big business. 70% of the world's GDP comes from services. Yet we, that includes all the consultants you've used to date, persist in using a manufacturing model to measure value creation and improve our business processes. Imagine the added capacity...
Eliminating non-value-adding work means changing the way you do the work. But changing the way you work can be challenging.
First though, you need to identify the waste work. You can use standard strategic business process modelling and enterprise architecture to help you understand your organisation, assess its current state.
Then, by asking the right questions, use this information to guide your service organisation's process improvement projects to generate more revenue and improve client relations... with minimal capital expenditure.
- Focus your change management projects
- Reduce core process waste
- Become more client-focussed
- But above all, make change safe
Your future productivity depends on it!