Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The Service Imperative: Delivery UP, Expenses DOWN!


Over the years I’ve enjoyed numerous opportunities to help Services Organizations improve performance while holding the line, even reducing, operating and capital expenses.

These Services Organization include Finance, Information Technology, Human Resources, and Procurement organizations, whether operating as stand-alone units or as parts of a Shared Services Center.

These units provide vital support to their organizations.  They are high performers, providing far better service and value than could be obtained through outsourcing.

But each faces a similar challenge, a challenge that is central for Services Organizations of every stripe.

“How can we provide superior service, in-house, while growing appreciably slower than our overall company?”

Let me offer some examples of organizations meeting this challenge.
  • A CFO Function supporting a company growing 15% per year challenged itself to hold increases in CFO expenses to less than 5% per year.
  • An HR organization supporting a fast-growing, global technology company enjoying double digit growth had no change in staffing or expenses over two years.
These Service Organizations do not work magic, nor do they drive their people into the ground with unreasonable workloads.  

Instead they drive continuous improvements in Service Productivity, creating capacity to serve while concurrently delivering higher levels of service.

It’s a bit like taking parts off the plane, decreasing weight and thus increasing speed, while soaring ever upward.

Which sounds good, but how?

Growing businesses have dynamic support demands.  Most Services Organizations reflexively commit to new work, often failing to prune much of the work that is no longer needed.  Chaos follows when new corporate and unit-level technologies are introduced and oftentimes layered on old technologies. 

Meridian helps leaders achieve step-changes in Service Productivity.  We provide special expertise eliminating waste and non-value added work, allowing your Services Organization to deliver superior support while holding the line on expenses.

Based on our experience we are especially committed to:
  • Increasing time people spend interacting with customers; 
  • Eliminating time consumed by waste and non-value added work;  

  • Identifying opportunities for rationalizing the technologies that support your work, ensuring people effectively use the technologies you have and helping you identify technologies that will drive further efficiencies and service quality.
We accomplish these improvements by working with individuals, supervisors, and managers across your Services Organization to understand what is done, by whom, for whom, and why.  With these insights we lead Service personnel to identify the obvious changes in work, policies, and procedures that increase capacity to serve while further identifying the non-FTE costs that can be pruned or eliminated.

The scope and magnitude of your results will be what you want them to be, but it’s a lock that your Services Organization will more efficiently support company growth at the end of this short, focused initiative.