In today’s economy, businesses are facing heavy competition (from all over the world), demanding customers and commoditization of products and services. All of this is driving down prices and increasing pressure to cut costs. All departments are being asked to do more with less. A company’s success in this economy depends on their ability to be more efficient than their competition.
Efficiency is all about Process
Gartner defines BPM as “a management practice that provides for governance of a business’ process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance. BPM is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes.”
This brings me to my mantra – just do it!
The best time to improve efficiency is when you don’t have to. Most companies won’t do that. In today’s economy, companies have to get more efficient to survive.
A number of years ago, HP directed all of their divisions to come up with ten-fold efficiency gains. I thought that this target was too steep however, many of the divisions succeeded. Here is the process they followed:
First, pick one of the 20% of your processes that provide 80% of your value, and then follow these 5 steps.
- Document the process – who performs what activities when?
- Verify that the process is documented properly [that is how it really works].
- Measure how long the existing process takes.
- Improve the process.
- Measure the process again to make sure you have improved it.
Your company can have the same kind of success if you just do it…
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