Brian Plowman continues his look at finding hidden cost saving opportunities.
By Brian Plowman
The opportunity
The invisibility and lack of understanding of the interfacing activities previously discussed is always costly and reduces employee satisfaction and levels of service to both internal and external customers.
Undocumented interfacing activities usually take up over 50% of the total activity routinely undertaken and so impact on the productivity, which is keenly felt by staff. For one thing it’s doubtful if all the extra work would have been included in the budget so they are constantly under pressure to get their main work done in the normal hours allotted.
And the rub is staff know that if they were asked they’d come up with solutions or at least attempt to eliminate the root causes.
How big is the hidden opportunity? The analysis of the data from 300+ organisations found that about 80% of the undocumented interfacing activities all had the characteristics of the examples described in my previous blogs; correcting errors, chasing missing equipment and so forth for which we coined the word NOISE as handy shorthand that everyone could immediately relate to.
The frightening statistic is that in high performing organisations about 20-25% of total resource is typically absorbed by NOISE activities though for some less fortunate organisations this figure rose, with some functions and processes experiencing over 60%.
This means there is a huge opportunity for your company to save money by identifying and eradication NOISE from the business. Find out how this can be approached in Brian’s next blog on finding hidden cost saving opportunities.
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