Brian Plowman provides the last in his series of blogs. This week he discusses the cost saving exercise of identifying and eradicating NOISE from your business.
By Brian Plowman
How much NOISE is there in your business?
Asking managers to document the detail of where time is actually being spent, categorising it to highlight where problems lie and proposing solutions tends to drop into the "sorry, too busy” box. The level of detail required to expose NOISE is a stumbling block unless an efficient, cost effective way of handling the volume of data can be found. Process visualisation is needed and that means to prompt, prioritise and then track proposals for improvements through to measuring that the benefits are finally delivered.
Finding and nailing down NOISE not only gives an immediate opportunity for cost reduction, it provides a foundation for systematic and continuous business improvement in five important ways:
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Staff are committed to the outcomes because they measure their reality, revealing constraints, causes of process failure and obstacles to their performance
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Managers who suspect business processes are failing can pinpoint every cause and prioritise them for correction
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Rapid data collection and process visualisation leads to quick wins
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The more radical core business process opportunities are identified for competitive breakthrough
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Increased understanding of processes underpins the role of technology in delivering benefits
For most organisations the imperative is to pursue improvements to productivity. But trying to motivate staff through incentives to work harder, setting targets and most forms of performance measures, simply misses the point.
You only get to the real savings when you get close enough to the hidden detail which exposes NOISE; the unanticipated and thus undocumented interfacing activities that lie hidden in every organisation.
Finding them, finding what drives them and eliminating them will deliver at least a 25% cost saving, most likely with no capital investment.
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