As a company grows, its senior executives become further away from customers. You start to delegate thousands and more tasks that aren’t within your control, as your company’s frontline moves out of your reach. It is right that the senior leader cannot continue to wear multiple hats if your goal is to reach a real scale with your product or services. To be able to satisfy more customers’ needs, your organization must expand through the addition and complexity of new people and processes. This is where chaos can occur, as adding one person to an existing process or person creates additional layers that interact with your existing people and processes. However, there are ways to control chaos and prevent it from occurring. It’s called process improvement.
Four Key Elements To Concentrate On
It doesn’t take too much to improve the process. Process improvement is about four core concepts. They focus on minimizing rework as well as managing timing and clearing bottlenecks.
1. Minimizing Rework
How much would your company lose if the labour and the materials were used to make your product/service? Everyday companies make mistakes. Giving team members the tools they need to do the job right can reduce the risk of human error. This can be as simple as a replacement of a hammer with a nail gun, or as simple as a text box that has a dropdown option. It is possible to create standard operating procedures and proper training so that employees can perform the task consistently. You don’t have to create standard operating procedures. However, you can create a checklist that will help you create repeatable processes and then refine the process over time. Do not leave them up to chance.
2. Managing Timing
You can manage timing by focusing your attention on the right priorities at just the right time and delivering outputs only when it is most appropriate. Prioritize the important and urgent priorities first. It is important to prioritize tasks that are both urgently and critically important. If something is urgent but not important, it can be put off until the main priorities are complete. It is worth considering whether you should do it if it is urgent but not essential. Another aspect of timing is to deliver them in a timely fashion. This doesn’t necessarily mean “as soon possible”. The outputs of one procedure become the inputs for another. The receiver, producer, or both can find it inefficient to deliver a deliverable before it is needed. Inefficient handling of duplicates and stockpiling materials can also lead to receivers stockpiling. The best practice is to arrange delivery in advance.
3. Clearing Out Bottlenecks
Clearing bottlenecks will often be the improvement most team members feel most connected to first. This is because, just like other bottles, bottlenecks in companies are often at the top. Every process has a bottleneck. This is what controls how fast work can flow from input to output. In the same way, you will find another bottleneck somewhere else. This could be downstream or upstream from the constraint. Clear any remaining bottlenecks by rinsing and then reopening them as necessary. If you have enough experience, you can look at the whole process and predict when bottlenecks will occur. Then make a drastic change to manage all of them simultaneously.
4. Maximize The Value
It is not optimal to offer customers many benefits and features they don’t need. It is important to minimize wasteful actions and only provide what customers value. Find out what your customers want and build your process to deliver those features with as few steps as possible. Create multiple outputs that meet customer needs whenever possible. For maximizing value, consider the following questions: If your customer was watching you and knew that the final product/service would cost them money, would they do this? Your customer would be happy to pay the price for your product/service if they knew how complicated and wasteful it was to deliver the solution.
These four concepts by BGB are simple to grasp and will simplify many aspects of chaos in a typical company. Executing these simple principles will bring you a positive return on your time and allow you to improve the efficiency and quality of your operations. Each member of the team could apply one principle every day for exponential results in a quarter.
