Process Improvement = Business Improvement
Most companies want to be a well-oiled machine…there’s my “no kidding remark” for this post! The best examples are the companies where the background employees (read about who the background employees are in a previous blog post!) are able to give the illusion of being automated by the most sophisticated AI, rather than run by people for how smoothly/quickly everything happens. Well-oiled companies have processes that are so effective that the customer never even knows how complex things may be behind-the-scenes. Companies where the front-line employees are able to set things up, make the sale, upsell, and know that everything else is going to be taken care of by their back-office staff without any further input from them. These companies have done the hard work of process improvement, such that they are constantly improving their business.
Fully well-oiled companies are RARE. More often, companies may do one or two things related to process improvement, but the overall structure of the company remains “that’s how we’ve always done things”. What’s worse though is that frequently, employees in these standard companies will raise a legitimate complaint about a process or procedure, but that complaint never goes anywhere.
Ignoring this opportunity for improvement is where business death begins!
How does your company handle these ideas (read: complaints) for process improvement? Are the idle “oh this never works right” complaints, taken as seriously as the “here’s a problem that we deal with a lot in this department, and here’s my idea for fixing it!” This is honestly one of the most gray of all the gray areas. Some businesses will take these ideas and put them in a big (real or metaphorical) folder…never to be seen or heard from again. Some more proactive businesses will create an internal committee/“think tank” to address the problem. This group will usually come to the conclusion that this isn’t actually a problem and nothing changes, or it will spend so long being debated that nothing helpful happens for far too long. These are the “that’s just how we’ve always done it” companies. And they’re far more common than people think. Often these complaints seem like such a small part of the day-to-day operations that it’s not worth the time investment of thinking about it…much less the monetary investment of fixing it.
Is the investment worth it?
Let’s take a look at this investment from a different angle, though, with a process we’re all used to…making coffee. You have a procedure for making coffee that everyone is used to. Everyone knows how to do it, and it’s just part of daily routine. With the current process, it takes about 30 minutes to get the coffee ready to drink in the morning. The process has a known, set cost in both money and time, and it’s all included in your budget. This is “the way you’ve always done it”.
Here’s the thing…in the breakroom, your employees are always talking about how it feels like they’re wasting time making the coffee when they’d rather be drinking it right off the bat…especially when the coffee pot needs to be cleaned! If your employees feel like they’re wasting time, that’s clue number one that there is a LOT of room for process improvement. When the employees notice that a process is costing them time and/or productivity, they’re less inclined to follow that process. When that happens, mistakes happen…like burned coffee in this case.
How do we start streamlining this process, ultimately improving this business?
Staying with my coffee metaphor, there’s a few things we can do. We can file these issues and complaints away in a “suggestion box”. We all know where that will go! We can put together an internal committee that we all know won’t really get around to the crux of the issue. We can put a Band-Aid on the true issue by simply buying a new coffee pot that will look nicer than the current one. Fancier/newer will buy you maybe a month of fewer complaints, but you’ll still have the same underlying problem in time consumption. What if you brought in an objective third party to set up the best solution that’s tailored to your business - a bit of a stretch for such a simple issue, sure. Take a look at how addressing the underlying issues can pay off in big dividends though -
This third party brings in an improved coffee pot that will grind the coffee for you, is self-cleaning and pulls the water directly from the tap. It doesn’t rely on the assumed courtesy of the person who drinks the last of it to re-brew the coffee, and only takes about 7 minutes to brew a double carafe of excellent coffee on its own. Here’s the catch…it’s a bit of an upfront cost to install, and it requires a maintenance contract to ensure that it keeps running/stays full of coffee beans. Total cost of this new coffee pot? $6,000 plus an annual fee of $1200 for maintenance. That might sound ridiculous, but stay with me….
There’s the old adage…we all know it… “time is money”. Therefore, if you could improve the process of making the coffee so your employees could start drinking it sooner, what would the cumulative savings be? If you could get 20 minutes back every morning, that would be an additional 100+ minutes of productivity each week…that's at least 400 minutes every month! That’s a whopping 4,800 minutes, or 80 hours (!) of additional productivity every YEAR simply because you brought in an objective outsider and changed how you make the coffee in the office. And that’s assuming your office only makes one pot of coffee a day (cue hysterical laughter)! You know your business…with an extra 80 hours of productivity each year, how fast will that upfront investment pay for itself?
This is about WAY more than coffee though…
Here is the whole point of my caffeinated metaphor: there are SO many different “making the coffee” processes in any business. Things that “have always been done this way”. And really, your coffee process probably won’t make or break your business, but being stuck in comfortable routines and fear of change just might. Once that becomes the prevailing mindset, business improvement - business growth - is impossible. You can’t change the big problems without addressing the little ones first! A #kingdomclass company is one who considers the phrase “this is just how we’ve always done it” to be the foulest of curses! What are you doing to avoid that phrase? How are you looking at and analyzing each process in your business objectively? What tools are you using to help? Give us a call, and we’ll show you a few!
