Efficiency
If you are unfamiliar with it’s benefits, you are probably not responsible for much at your organization. It is not that we appreciate efficiency so much, as we don’t appreciate in-efficiency. In fact to some of us who function as quality and efficiency experts- we hate it. We see cost overruns, poor customer relationships, loss of market share, mediocre performance and an unmotivated work force. We see redundancy and lack of interdepartmental teamwork. We see a loser.
Unfortunately, the larger some beauracracies get, the more inefficiency we find. It is understandable that when there is so much going on and so much complexity, that people just haven’t had the time yet to get after it. Hopefully, they will get to it some time however. When inefficiency is noticeable in small companies it is a reflection of bad management. Unfortunately, in today’s competitive economy, if your operations either internally or externally smack of inefficiency, you will soon find yourself on the chopping block.
So what does it mean—to be efficient? A few key concepts will give you a place to start.
The first areas to address are your front line customer interactions. Efficiency is one of the 10 core predictors of satisfaction and is closely tied to others such as ease of access and timeliness. In short, customers want a single point of access where they can get their needs met. It is shocking how many organizations don’t get this and regularly hemmorage customers.
Whatever process you want to pick, get a piece of paper and make a simple flow chart. Look at the process from the customers’ point of view. A true story illustrates this concept quite graphically:
I let the registration expire on an old truck I was restoring. After several months of engine work etc., I was ready to put it back on the road. With my new proof of insurance in hand I trooped down to my local Division of Motor Vehicles and waited two hours to get to a window with a human. Despite having my checkbook at the ready, I was not allowed to pay my registration renewal until I paid an extra fourteen-dollar reinstatement fee. “I’m sorry sir, but we don’t take that fee here sir, you have to call this number and make arrangements to pay them by telephone”. I couldn’t believe that I was not able to pay my DMV registration fee at the DMV, but then the plot thickened.
When I called the phone number after waiting through several layers of voicemail hell, the person on the phone gave me a fax number to send a copy of my insurance documents. “But didn’t my insurance company automatically send you notification of my insurance?” I asked. “We don’t have access to that information sir”, was the response I got. “Go ahead and fax your information and then wait 24 hours so we can get to it”. “Can’t you take care of this RIGHT NOW?” I asked, realizing that I was going to need several more interactions with this process over several days- just what I wanted to be doing.
Since I don’t use a fax machine anymore, I went to my local office supply store and faxed it from there. I waited at the office supply store for a good 20 minutes while the fax machine tried to get through, but was busy. I finally left the store, hoping it would go through later, or the next day. It never did.
I called the number back again and went through the voicemail hell another time to get to a human who might help me. “OH I’m sorry sire, that fax number is always busy—try this one instead”. I took the new number back to my office supply store fax machine and sent the insurance info again. I called back every hour on the hour to see if they had gotten it. Their typical response was that it would take another 24hrs for them to get to but I called and badgered them anyway. Finally, they acknowledged receiving my insurance information. “So are we all set then?” I asked hopefully. “No Sir, I’m sorry but it takes 72 hours for us to enter this data into our system, and tomorrow is a Saturday…” I resisted the temptation to use a colorful metaphor that might adequately describe my feelings of frustration.
I returned to the DMV five days later, waited another two hours and finally was able to pay for my registration tags. This was a good example for an article on inefficiency, I thought to myself.
When one analyzes the technical systems, labor, and wasted employee hours associated with this simple little process, it is no wonder that California is 24 billion in the hole this year. The basic problem is that no one is looking at efficiency from a holistic perspective- or from the customer’s perspective it seems. Is this DMV process an opportunity to outsource to a private organization? I would have willingly paid a little extra to do this on one visit somewhere else- like the automobile club. If the DMV was a private business, I would have never have shopped there again
Unfortunately for some of you out there- what I am talking about sounds distressingly similar to your own company. So what can you do?
Besides making a detailed flow chart, see how long each step in your flowchart takes. Next see if you can re-arrange or eliminate any of the steps. See which steps are being repeated needlessly. If you really want to have fun and motivate yourself, try putting cost data on each of the steps.
When you finally develop some real awareness of what is going on in your processes, you will probably get to the point where you need to solve a problem to get the process to run faster or with less steps. For this a handy tool is what’s called Root Cause Analysis.
Basically, your problem is being caused by one of only a few kinds of factors: Manpower, Materials, Methodology, or Environment. If you can boil your process bottlenecks down to one of these factors you can start coming up with potential solutions.
The key is next to run some experiments and see if it works better in a new way. Take measurements, get feedback, survey customers. The best part is, if it works you will inevitably save money—and some people allot of frustration. Next train everyone in the company to optimize their own processes for greater efficiency- faster cycle times, less rework, less mistakes etc.. Inefficient organizations are loaded with low hanging fruit for improvement.
If this sounds like your company, you can make fruit salad.
Bart Allen Berry
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