Five Myths of Operational Effeciency (cont’d)
3.
Productivity
comes with
efficiency
Many of us expect that productivity is
achieved when there is efficiency. That
is not necessarily the case. Productivity
is a relative measure. What you include
as an input and output might lead
to different conclusions. Beware of a
narrow focus on activities within the
business only.
Imagine a situation where a business
needs to share data with a third
party to complete the delivery of its
service. Every month, it provides a
customer file, which is easy to produce
as it is a data dump. Unfortunately,
the third-party partner needs to do
a fair amount of data manipulation
before consumption. Producing the
rudimentary report is considered
efficient from the business's
perspective, but is unproductive work.
4.
The lower the
staff count
the better
Labour costs account for a major
portion of the operating costs in most
businesses. There is no debate that
technology has displaced labour in
many ways. However, we still need
workers to provide the human touch
that an application or machine
doesn’t offer. Inadequate staffing is
problematic.
Customer support remains a service
where the human touch is preferred.
It is not helpful when a customer has
an issue and is put on hold for an
hour before speaking with an agent.
It is frustrating when the interactive
voice response system has multilevel instructions that don’t lead to a
human who could provide assistance.
It is annoying to do an online chat
when the wait time between typed
responses is long because the agent
is handling multiple customers at the
same time.
5.
Automation is a
necessary driver
of efficiency
The advance of technology has made
it rewarding to mechanize routine
work. Manual work is deemed to be
inefficient and error prone. However,
mechanizing chaos is a waste of capital.
Adopting technology without doing
the proper due diligence is haphazard.
Many companies hop on the
bandwagon and implement
applications such as Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) tools.
The appeal of automation leads them
to plunge in without clearly defining
how the new tool would make the
intended work more efficient. As a
result, users’ expectations are not met.
The tool is abandoned.
An “efficient” job is not necessarily a
job well done. It is crucial to determine
the results you are aiming for before
diving into how best to achieve them.
This will lend a proper perspective
to what would work best. The need
for a customer-focused orientation
differs from an internal need to drive
efficiency. When you understand
the intent that is meaningful for
the business, applying the proper
operational efficiency mindset delivers
the best results.
A professional engineer and
Certified Management Consultant,
Connie Siu is president of CDC
Synectics, a company that
provides consulting and training
on productivity improvement,
performance measurement, and
strategy execution.
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