Operational Inefficiency and its Overcoming

Fortune 1000 enterprises are losing more money in operational inefficiency due to data quality issues than they spend on data warehouse and CRM initiatives, according to Gartner, Inc. principal analyst Ted Friedman.

A process is a transformation; it transformsits inputs into its outputs (nouns) using the activities inbetween (verbs). This can be captured at best as Process map - A visually depicts the sequence of events to build a product or produce an outcome.

Lets consider a case when two organisations competing for the same sells similar products / service to the customer of same business segment or vertical. Here compnies would like to differentiate themselves based on how well they manage to perform their processes.

There should be effort to make "Process effectiveness" first. We can oversee that there is a very clear correlation between an organisation’s effectiveness (w.r.t. organisational performance such as staffwellbeing, profitability, customer satisfactionand product quality), and its level ofprocess awareness. Michael Cousins, MD and majority shareholder of Triaster, says "Involving people, in the context of process improvement, is fundamentally aboutassigning responsibility for the processes to the staff that perform them, and then supplying the necessary management guidance and support to enable those processesto be performed well, and to be improved continually."

Tips for Increasing Operational Efficiency:

1. Provide employees with secure, consistent access to information.
2. Analyze the current situation.
3. Create effective business processes with partners & Optimize business processes.
4. Improve employee retention and satisfaction.
5. Modernize, make it easy to collaborate and expand.
6. Maximize the growth opportunity.
7. Streamline communications with customers.
8. Outsourcing tasks at low cost without compromising with quality or missing any SLA.

There can be many many other items equally important.

Today, there is no single unique structure or process that defines “continuous improvement and acheiving Operational excellency”. The bestway is to start thinking and acting on the various possible options that can be exploited in the relevant scenario and try to optimize the process, remove redundancy, reduce cost, increase efficiency, reduce unproductive cycle time as well as production time.