DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Successful Business owners and senior managers share an ‘efficiency mindset’. In everything they do, they seek the most cost effective method and look to maximize ROI at every stage. Following on from the Global Financial crisis, managers have been put under unprecedented pressure to lean up their business and every cent of every dollar of expenditure has been put under scrutiny. This flurry of cost reduction activity has caused some senior managers to become somewhat over excited. The mindset has moved from ‘doing more with less’ to one of simply survival.

The biggest problem with this mindset it that sooner or later when the economy does turnaround, your business needs to be fit enough to survive the feeding frenzy that will ensue. It may be attractive to cut suppliers or reduce your headcount now but what does that do for your operational effectiveness. Is your business really capable of reacting to a spike in demand?

Managers are therefore on the lookout for cost reduction strategies that can save money now but have more long term operational effectiveness.

One area that CFO’s and COO’s look towards are business process improvements initiatives. By analyzing the processes in a business and ‘re-engineering’ them, substantial cost savings can be realized and in the process, making the business more effective and agile.

The benefits of Business process improvements are well known and acknowledged but they are largely thought about as long term initiatives. Most CFO’s view business process improvement initiatives as an exercise that will take a minimum of 6 months to implement and it’s not uncommon for projects to blow out to two or even three years. In this current economic climate, many ‘C’ level executives are overly focused on short term initiatives and rule out business process engineering before they have really had a chance to consider it.

The reason that this is such flawed logic is that Business Process engineering doesn’t have to take this long. Modern days consulting houses such as Synoptic document, analyse and re-engineer a business process in only 5 – 8 days. Exactly, how they do this is beyond the scope of this article but the time-frame is involved is what is most important to understand.

Next, having established our “to –be” processes a vehicle is needed to ‘operationalise’ the changes. Again, based on previous experience ‘C’ level executives perceive Software implementations as both longwinded and costly affairs and sadly some of the best intentioned projects never see the light of day.

Software development has moved on in leaps and bounds in recent times which means that ‘C’ Level executives need to takes a revised view what is possible with modern software development toolsets.

One such toolset is SEBA from Solentive. Rather than start from scratch with each new development, a licensed version of their software development ‘chassis’ is made available. This means that timeframe and budgets for the implementation of new business processes are reduced with dramatic effect.

A tool set is made available to Managers or ‘business process owners’ to allow them to build or modify business processes as they change. What the manager perceives as a business process in their management application is viewed as a series of screens for the end user at the shop floor level.

Furthermore, through a powerful combination of workflow and business rules engine technology, SEBA can guide the user to make more cost effective decisions at decision points along the path of the process.

By combining the best of both of these approaches, ‘C’ Level executives could potentially move from mapping to implementation of business processes in less than 14 days. This can be very attractive to a manager who is looking to refine business processes and see a rapid return on their investment.

More business technology articles by David Birchall can be discovered at http://www.davidbirchall.bircko.com

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