Your business is simple; right? Do some market research, design a product, send out sales people, take orders, make it, ship it, invoice and collect. Everyone in the company of course knows how this works. Not! Into every company I have entered, upon researching this flow and laying it out we found some or all of:
•duplicate procedures: people, paper, and data following two separate tracks
•information flow disconnects: dropped data requiring reconstruction elsewhere
•dropped data; valuable information permanently discarded
•changing product designations from one department to the next: unbelievable, but departmental myopia prevails
•laborious procedures open to simple automation: web-based or off-the-shelf solutions readily available
•automations of relatively simple procedures complicated beyond belief: an IT person creates a life-long project maintaining a self-developed system
•critical parameters in the process ignored or treated carelessly: conversion of design wins to sales forecast done by guesswork
•unimportant parameters in the process amplified: immaculate details of trivia
•shipped product designations don't match internet designation: lost re-orders
•the list is endless
No matter how mature the company, don't assume this life-blood system is in order. By researching it from scratch, you'll always find significant opportunities for reducing costs, reducing errors, improving revenues, tightening up the process from beginning to cash collection, and making you and your organization smarter.
How do you do it? Send a smart young person on a walk-through tour from the beginning to the end, following manually every flow and node in the process, logging in how data is handled, procedures used, time lags, changes in nomenclature, dropped data, error possibilities, etc. etc. Also, call or internet back to test those external-connection processes. Place orders on line by untrained people: See what problems occur. Then build a very detailed and specific map on a whiteboard. This whole process isn't that hard, doesn't take too long, but the result will be powerful. Look for the problems listed above. There will be several, at a minimum, moments of "I can't believe we do that". Take it from there and get meaningful, lasting results for a small investment. Following are examples; the list could be hundreds from my experience but i've just selected a few:
One company had an elaborate and costly system to gather information on design wins, but then one individual based on his opinions and no historic algorithms or decision tools converted these into a, extremely inaccurate, sales forecast.
Another company allowed customer billing data to exist manually only, requiring several days of resonstruction before an invoice went out, missing out on a one-time millions of dollars of cash.
A technology company changed designations of individual products three times in their system, sales, manufacturing, and engineering all had their own codes. The error rate in processing orders was amazingly high from the continuous translations required.
A consumer products company principally using internet sales had different product designations between their on-line catalog and on their shipped products. A satisfied customer was stymied trying to re-order more of the product. Also their web site prevented a prior customer from placing an order based on "email address already in use", with no easy work-around.
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