It is easy to get tangled in the weeds. Especially when there are 10 people’s worth of work and only 5 bodies to do it. Finding and championing new ways of improving the operation is typically low—or last—on the list. It often elicits responses like:
“What we’re doing works.”
“We don’t have time to change or add something new.”
“I don’t have enough people to start another project.”
“Last time we tried that it was a disaster.”
“I use a spreadsheet. It’s a pretty elegant solution if you ask me.” (Wait, what?? Really??)
The reactions are all understandable (that last one is confusing, honestly). After all, we all must protect our time as best we can.
The problem with these responses is that they miss the forest for the trees.
While common, these positions are driven by the failure to connect the dots that can prove spending time on one thing (your operations processes and flows) ultimately helps address challenges with the many other things that constrict performance and throttle growth.
Things Like:
- Company reputation
- Operational efficiency
- Employee productivity, satisfaction, and longevity
- Regulatory compliance
- Innovation and adaptability
So how do you do that?
To understand the potential impact (and value) of an activity—like implementing process improvements or new tools—it is important to understand the connection between your organization’s various pieces, parts, and processes and the changes you’re considering. Especially the connections to seemingly unrelated (or at least not obvious) parts of the value chain.
Effectively, you are building a map of the linkages between your specific business activities and other activities or functions within (and even outside of) the business, and assigning a value to those linkages.
Once you build that into your practice, you can see—and articulate—how valuable a change in process, practice, or toolset will be for your business.
It sounds complicated. It isn’t.
For example, if you are considering ways to help your customer service team manage the flow of orders and sales requests, you want to understand how those activities impact or support other functions up and down the value chain. Because it’s about more than just the customer service team.
You might map things like:
- Who relies on our order processing workflows?
- Our sales reps
- Our reps’ customers, including surgeons, receiving, SPD, materials managers
- Our warehouse and logistics teams
- Our shipping partners
- Our inventory and supply chain analysts
- Our finance department
- What impact does the speed of order processing have on our (and our customers’) business?
- Increased shipping costs from delays
- Reduced shipping costs with enough advanced notice
- Potential surgery delays or cancellations
- Impacts on Inventory Turnover Ratios
- What are the risks and impacts if we make an error in defining the order requirements?
- Risk to the brand
- Risk to our revenue
- Risk to audit and compliance
- Risk to the distribution network
- How does bad data impact our logistics team?
- Creates additional work
- Impacts team morale
- Creates the risk of shipping the wrong product
- Adds overhead for logistics managers
- What other teams are impacted by bad data or poor data quality?
- Sales team
- Analytics team
- Health providers
- AP/AR team
- HR team
- What are the costs to us if we have to ship new or additional products because of data errors?
- Increased shipping fees hit the bottom line
- Impact on brand reduces goodwill value
- Loss of customers impacts revenue
This is not a comprehensive list. But you can see that order fulfillment driven by the CS team is not just about the one case you’re trying to fulfill or even the one team managing the front end of the process.
There are cascading impacts up and down your value chain. Many carry long-term impacts.
Unless you thoroughly map the connections and assign real value to each link, various risks and opportunities will remain unknown to most of your team. And that will stifle your business.
Each process your team designs and implements will have linkages. Even if those processes have never been formalized, they impact your business in one way or another, for better or worse.
It’s important to define those linkages and implement processes, practices, and tools to mitigate the risks and maximize the possibilities. Hold your team accountable to do the same.
This is not busy work. It is a foundational piece of a strategic business, because lack of visibility supports (or covers up) poor decisions when assessing the need for change.
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