Processes are supposed to help organizations scale and improve efficiency, but they can quickly get out of control. The flip side is a lack of processes can create inefficiencies. The lack of processes or process redundancy can have a significant impact to your bottom line. Here are a few examples of productivity killers that might impact your business:
1) Having spent some time in the banking industry, banking over time has developed silos between sales and credit. Silos sometimes can eat up a huge amount of resources if processes have to be managed over multiple platforms.
2) Many of my clients that use technology that streamline end up with platforms that don’t talk to each other. The result is critical information has to be “re-keyed” multiple times across platforms, a huge redundancy.
3) Growth can create situations where processes are outdated and the business is experiencing bottlenecks or chokepoints. This can be due to not adapting to new technologies. These types of hurdles can cause major slowdowns and those slowdowns have far reaching impacts.
Here’s the financial impact of two bottlenecks GE experienced. In Entrepreneur magazine, GE reported that just a 1% improvement in oil recovery was worth 80 billion additional barrels per year, roughly the equivalent of billions of dollars in additional revenue. Another finding was just one day of down-time on an offshore platform causes $7 million per day in lost production.
Here’s the fix: Adapting to new technologies and being open to new solutions is the best way to improve processes. Be aware of a process that seems to be slowing down your business and actively pursue a way to improve it.