As frequent readers of our blog will know, the Council has focused a lot of attention recently on the topic of finding hidden inefficiencies within Operations. These are costs that often go untracked but present significant opportunities for sustainable cost reduction. Our recent studies have featured solutions for Operations to root out inefficiency through achieving process excellence and establishing optimal standards.
Next month we’ll present our third and final segment on “Uncovering Hidden Inefficiencies” with a study that focuses on discovering and eliminating “coordination-based inefficiencies”, the unnecessary or additional costs that can arise when working across multiple stakeholders.
In particular, we’ve focused on how members are eliminating coordination costs across 3 different types of relationships:
- Between Operations and internal business partners (e.g. Sales, IT, Product, other functions),
- Between Operations and external business partners or vendors, and
- Within different units of Operations.
To date, we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with members on best practices for increasing alignment on goals and incentives, preventing unnecessary or duplicate siloed processes, effectively utilizing shared resources (including extra staff capacity), and more.