Case Study: Cutting Through Complex Processes
How to achieve 6-figure savings by streamlining business processes
New Pace Consulting - What we do
We identify process areas of high complexity and drive process simplification. As a result, organisations reduce their process costs and become leaner and more agile. Our activities include conducting onsite workshops and setting up mechanisms to keep processes simple even when environments change.
Case Study Summary
The US subsidiary of a global company was challenged by declining order volumes. Our analysis showed that the internal order-handling processes were too cumbersome to cope with the planned number of incoming orders. This situation resulted in customer dissatisfaction, employee frustration and high process costs. The implemented process simplifications brought a six figure US-dollar saving per year, in addition to increased scalability and higher customer satisfaction.
The following case study was performed 2008 in Brazil for a global company in the high tech industry, listed at the NYSE.
Starting position: Business challenges
- High process costs
- Business processes were too complex and not adapted to targeted volume business
- Missing process scalability was setting ambitious growth plans on risk
- Limited agility and flexibility of organisation
- No standardised processes within Latin America region
- Planned transfer of business processes to a regional shared service centre was very challenging
Project goals and scope
The business process improvement project was set up to overcome the above mentioned business challenges, in particular, to:
- Reduce process costs
- Simplify processes
- Make processes scalable for further growth
- Prepare processes for the transfer to a shared service centre
Project scope: sales order handling and order booking processes
Methods, tools and deliverables
The standard BPM1 execution kit was applied, including:
- Setting BPM standards
- Creation of policies and guidelines repository
- As-is process documentation (swimlanes)
- BPM maturity assessment
- Process improvement workshops (remotely)
- Definition of to-be processes
- Bi-weekly action follow-up calls
Achievements / Results
The following quantitative and qualitative benefits were achieved after 90 days:
- Administration: number of emails necessary for order booking reduced by 70%
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Processes are scalable to allow growth
- Increase of data quality for accurate business planning
- Sales force focus on sales instead internal process handling
- Lower business risks
- Processes are prepared to be transferred to a shared service centre
Next steps
Contact us for more information or to schedule a 90 minutes complementary process strategy session to evaluate how much you can save by cutting through process complexity.
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1 BPM = Business Process Management