Have you ever felt your organization was not humming along as well as it could? Have you ever wondered if the organization was operating at peak efficiency? Do you suspect your departments are individual silos, resulting in missed opportunities to collaborate and add value? Maybe you have discovered redundancies in your systems. I did.
What I found was duplication of effort and time wasted on low value tasks. We felt we were wasting a lot of time and money. And, this tedium was boring for our employees.
I had a couple of separate conversations with people that started the whole project called-Financial Process Redesign (for the financial elements) and Excellence in Execution for the rest of the organization. A few of our important outside business partners told me we were an expensive company with which to do business. Not the kind of comment one wants to hear from a valued partner. That worried me. Then, our CFO told me how much additional interest income we could generate if we just improved collections of our aged receivables by an average of just one day.
So, how could we speed up billing and collection to capture this low hanging fruit? We took a look at eliminating redundancies and low-value tasks and focused on those things that helped us meet our goals.
I created several robust cross-functional teams to look into these problems and charged them with finding our opportunities for improvement. Pulling people in from every department-staff and line functions, we put them on a variety of projects and we learned a great deal.
By mapping our workflow, we saw just how our work actually gets out the door…and how we could improve upon it. We better understood what got done where, and so were able to eliminate sacred cows and procedures that were no longer mission critical.
The teams found bottlenecks and old workflow systems established under previous computer models and were no longer appropriate. They found performance issues causing significant errors, double handling, and unnecessary processing.
Then we went outside the company to our key business partners and, with their help, redesigned our processes with them. It helped us all save money and helped us pay for other enhancements to our operating model.
This project ultimately was worth millions. You might want to look into doing this yourself.