What Price Complexity?

Complexity is insidious. Costs go sky high. People get confused and systems can’t cope.
When production and service cycles take forever, and costs are high, chances are that most of your processes are mired in complexity. Since Victorian times, companies have felt compelled to offer consumers whatever they want, creating a myriad of choice with goods and services each having their own process and production lines.

In turn these processes are supported by complex systems and require specific skills for bespoke services and products. How often do you hear the recital “oh we’re very different around here. What we are do is unique in the industry.”
And it probably is to the detriment of the very people you are trying to please – the customer.

Consider a few of the not so hidden costs of complexity:
1. Customer inconvenience – Your customers have to negotiate your complex system and its mind-numbing array of alternatives.
Q. Just how many Moments of Truth are there?

2. Unwieldy sales processes – The sales systems needed to support complex product lines soon grow too cumbersome, whether they require filling out complicated order forms, getting indecipherable invoices or navigating endless voice mail paths.
Q. How many rules exist to ‘guide and direct’ and are now out of date slowing things to crawl?
Q. How many handoffs occur in your processes between people, systems and services?
Eradicating those Moments of Truth, Rules and Breakpoints can change everything.

3. Impact on management – Eventually, even your managers will find numerous services and processes too much to track.
Q. How much money have you spent training people to deal with this complexity?
Remove the complexity and those inside-out approaches such as Six Sigma and Lean are not required!

4. As an absolute, the greater an organization’s complexity, the less focused its management.
Q. Where does all that management time get directed? Fire fighting and fixing problems caused by the nightmare of complexity.
Refocus management time to helping align processes for successful outcomes.

It doesn’t have to be this way.
Download the free report on ‘Accelerated Cost Reduction’ for the inside track and get on route one to success. http://www.cityprocessmanagement.com/CostReduction.html

Accelerated Cost Reduction – utilize ground breaking techniques created by the market leaders who have redefined their markets and continue to outplay the competition in every aspect of the game.

Zen and the Art of Business Process Management

In PartOne of this three part article we reviewed the factors driving transformational change and how the old ‘inside-out’ approach to business is about as useful as a steam engine in getting to the moon. In Part two we’ll look at how some of the world leading trend setter companies are embracing the new outside-in challenge and creating new powerful business models driven by advanced forms of BPM such as the Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM). . {…} more

Screw it – Let’s Do it (Part 3)

In the early parts we reviewed ‘Business Transformation are you on board?’ and the ‘Zen and the Art of Process Management’ and we now bring the story together with ‘Screw it – Let’s do it!’. In our efforts to improve our organzations we involve ourselves in approaches that frequently get mired in their own complexity. It doesn’t have to be that way.. . {…} more

See Part One Part Two

Slash Costs But don’t Kill the Business

Approaches such as Lean and Six Sigma are having a tough time in the face of a compelling need to dramatically reduce costs caused by the current economic downturn, credit squeeze and market volatility. Companies are looking beyond the ‘business as usual’ 5-10% annual reductions and need to slash costs just to stay in business. Tightening belts and just ‘doing things right’ really isn’t good enough anymore as long established companies go to the wall on the back of short term and short sighted decisions made in better times.. {…} more