Many CEO's overlook or show little interest in tightening up processes and procedures; in fixing inefficient ones; or in removing unnecessary ones. It's minutae they say, i have much more important matters to tend to. Well...maybe so; or maybe not! Because they’re not so glaring, it’s easy to push off fixing them. But individual inefficient or unnecessary processes and procedures waste finances, waste work hours, waste management capacity, and frequently create damage beyond these simple categories of waste. I'm continually amazed at the cumbersome processes and procedures that grow like topsy or are mandated by "corporate", and the damage they cause.
In Paradyne, the previous owner AT&T had jammed in an engineering cost report. It was quite impressive, capturing every possible bit of data concerning engineering spending that one could imagine. The report itself was a 3 inch stack of paper each month. Just a few problems. #1. About 30% of the entire engineering personnel time was used in filling out time sheets, looking up charge codes, fixing errors, double checking entries and the like. #2. No one actually looked at it, and certainly no decisions were made on the basis of it. #3. It didn't really matter where people were spending their engineering efforts as the company had not launched a successful new engineering based product in the last 4 years. #4. The engineering managers and the engineers themselves got psychologically twisted to a belief that filing the report correctly and on time was their primary purpose.
The fix! No one would say any company should spend extensive monies on engineering research and development without some form of cost control. But i did; at least temporarily. During my fourth week at Paradyne, we scrapped the entire reporting system. In ther short term, there wasn't much risk as our costs were "controlled" within certain boundaries. The benefits were way, way beyond the 30% time we freed up. Combining this decision with some heartfelt "let's get at it team" presentations, within a week the engineers were semi-jogging to their benches, working extra time, and geared to meeting technical objectives. This one act was so meaningful to the engineers who had longed for real technical objectives and work but who had gotten numbed into report writing that our productivity probably tripled. What a waste that cost control program was.
You may not find such a dramatic opportunity, but remember, eliminating the waste of inefficient or unnecessary processees almost always has greater intangible benefits than simply the $'s saved.
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