Steps to Improved Efficiency

1) Holistic Approach to Solution Planning

A key step to maintaining sustainable improvements in efficiency is having the right methodology that takes into consideration all facets of the organization and ensures costs are not being diluted. The methodology should accounts accurately for cross-organizational costs as part of ROI studies and/or process improvement planning including operational processes, cross-functional workforce involvement, systems and applications that are silo'ed or across shared services, etc.

2) Understanding the effects of internal and external barriers

Our teams often see organizations put a lot of effort into overcoming operational barriers that are not necessarily high value creating after taking into consideration all of the residual costs. These barriers may span across functional areas, geographies, related process chains, within programs and initiatives. We hear the argument that projects are prolonged 'because there has already been such an initial investment. Our approach to quantifying value is based on shifts in the cost function for different types of efficiency initiatives. Sunk costs in projects that do not create large shifts should be reevaluated. We often find that the barriers inhibiting the initiative were not properly taken into consideration or planned for accordingly. We have found specific tactics to help align initiatives to overall corporate goals and help our clients recover value from these on-going initiatives and programs by overcoming these internal and external barriers.

2) Aligning dissociated parts of the organization for overall improvement effectiveness

A key metric used by our teams is higher user adaption within the workforce based on solutions initiated and being delivered. Properly aligning different parts of the organization that may not be directly involved in initiatives is a key step to improving systems and processes and driving adaption. At CVF Solutions, Inc we use a 'direct/indirect' approach to determining who will be affected by changes, how those changes will affect their daily operations and how we can develop solution planning that minimizes the impact to direct and indirect users.