Beyond the horizon an opportunity exists for businesses to embrace a new normal. Companies need to focus on protecting their core business and minimising costs to deliver their products and/or services. In 2019, Gartner’s CEO Survey ranked ‘Productivity and Efficiency’ as amongst the top most strategic business priorities for 2020 and beyond, and stating “organisations need to lean up for more efficiency and scale”.

But, where do companies start? How do they know what is core or non-core in their business? And ultimately, how can they be confident that their decisions won’t compromise any competitive advantage making them worse off?

The fact of the matter is that reacting to challenging times can make or break a business. The most successful companies show strong resilience through hard times and some even see this as an opportunity to excel over their competitors. Companies can choose to scale down to weather the storm or look for opportunities to create efficiencies that enable them to grow when others are down. Even those that take small steps during this time to invest in operational improvements, may find themselves being able to bounce back faster than those that do nothing.

For companies that choose to be brave and take action in investing in operational efficiencies, there are three areas to focus on:

1. Clearly understand where customer value is delivered in the business. A precursor is obviously that a business already understands its customer value. If not, take a step back! Value stream mapping is a rapid approach for identifying where customer value resides in processes. It brings stakeholders together to start with the end in mind on what truly matters to the customer. This helps greatly in identify what processes are core or non-core to deliver value to the customer. Often I get challenged by organisations to consider the value to non-traditional customers such as regulatory bodies. They are certainly also to be considered as customers with compliance being of value.

2. Measure how to deliver customer value with the least amount of effort. Lean defines different types of waste in processes, which remain relevant today. But what has changed over the years is the ease to capture data for measuring waste and the many technology options for automation. Businesses historically struggled to systematically understand the amount of effort required to perform tasks. Many just didn’t track that information and needed to run exercises such as time and motion studies to understand what people spent time on and for how long. Today, many processes are supported in systems such as ERPs so data is available on effort timings. This data can show you where there is a significant effort in your processes to generate ideas for improvements. Emerging tools such as Robotics Process Automation, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence enable ways for automating those tasks that were traditionally manual too.

3. Create ownership among staff to make improvements. People buy-in remains the biggest hurdle in any change initiative. In my experience I’ve found the best ideas to come from those who work on the front line. They live and breathe the processes that they perform every day. They feel the pain of any manual effort or unnecessary workarounds from errors and are also well suited to generate ideas for improvements. More importantly supporting these improvements help create ownership among those who need to help implement them. Bringing staff together for value stream mapping can not only be eye-opening for everyone to understand end-to-end processes, but revealing of the amount of waste to the business.

How can Boxfish help? Our Boxfish platform is an online design and analysis tool for value streams and processes. It provides:

Real-time capturing of value streams and processes

Traditional techniques of value stream and process mapping rely on post-it notes on brown paper wall exercises. Whilst these exercises are powerful for collaboration among people, they aren’t so effective when people attend the sessions remotely. Additionally, converting value stream and process maps into digital formats for analysis and sharing among stakeholders can be time-consuming. Boxfish enables real-time documenting into an online platform making the outputs accessible to stakeholders anywhere. This reduces effort and delays in capturing and sharing of information.

Seamless measurement and automated analysis of waste in processes

Determining the level of efficiency in value streams and associated processes can be daunting, often requiring a significant amount of time in front of a spreadsheet. Boxfish provides a template for capturing value-added and non-value added effort in process steps and automatically calculates the percentage of efficiency for further improvement. It also aggregates the percentage efficiency/inefficiency from a process-level up to the value stream-level to show a dashboard of comparable efficiencies across all value streams. This enables stakeholders to priorities where investment is required to reduce waste.

Ongoing monitoring and tracking of waste

Boxfish enables staff to continue to monitor and track their level of efficiencies in processes. With every improvement, the associated reduction in effort in processes can be rewarding for staff to see as well as experience. The platform also surfaces the level of efficiency or inefficiency to higher-level management for support and justification of initiatives to make improvements. It’s a great communication tool for process challenges and improvements to be shared across the business.

Guidance and coaching services

Boxfish has specialists who can help organisations through their journey towards being lean. We have proven methodologies that bring good practices that work alongside the use of our platform.

If you’d like more information on how Boxfish can benefit your business, please contact us on sales@boxfish.global.

Rowan Teh
Co-Founder, Boxfish
rowan.teh@boxfish.global