Let me discuss my recent experience in seeking to transform the business practices of some of the region’s more important businesses.
Notwithstanding the giant steps we have made in establishing business improvement as an integral part of the commercial world today, I still find many large and important organisations driving improvement from within functions, as opposed to considering the end-to-end processes.
Functional divisions, such as procurement, accounting, HR, IT, tend to look inward when considering opportunities for improvement. As such, there are limited opportunities for efficiency improvements (both because of the human nature aspect “of course we are efficient!!” and the limited areas of “double-up” and repetition that occur within a narrow functional area). Hence many improvement initiatives within a functional brief are to do with control as opposed to efficiency.
By considering processes across the organisation, i.e. end-to-end, as opposed to down the functional divisions, there are more opportunities to consider:
a) The needs of the ultimate customer, as opposed to the organisation or division itself;
b) Areas where double-ups may occur – in particular this occurs where there is a handover from one functional department to the next, where each department needs to be assured that they are getting what they wanted, and they are not being “handed a pup” so to speak;
c) Whether each task or action truly adds value in delivering to the customer exactly what they want in the shortest period possible; and
d) The potential to better empower employees to “get it right first time”.
On the last point, it has been proven that the over-use of “checks and balances” by an organisation can so disempower the employee who originates a transaction that their only real performance indicator is the time it takes to perform their specific task. Since there are checks and double-checks further down the line, the employee both loses any sense of responsibility and ownership in relation to this transaction and also feels too confident that someone down the line will correct any errors they have made in originating the transaction.
As a rule, no more than 10% of all tasks and actions in a process should be of a review nature, since these steps add no value whatsoever to the customer’s deliverable. Hence, the elimination (or at least reduction) of “down the line checks and balances” can both improve the efficiency of an organisation’s processes and, in most cases, improve the quality of the transaction in that the originating employee becomes empowered and directly responsible for not only the speed of the transaction but also the accuracy of the input.
Combine this with an organisation structure where processes are considered “end-to-end” across the entire organisation and responsibility and accountability is linked to the entire process, as well as steps within the process, and we have achieved not only a more efficient and controlled process environment but also a workforce who are more aware of the relationship between their work and the needs of the customer. This ultimately leads to a more motivated and happy group of employees.