Is $50 Oil Impacting Your Business?
Revenues are
down [for whatever reasons], what steps will your company take to fix your
balance sheet?
Your options
are to increase revenues and/or cut costs or some combination of both. Most companies can find ways to improve both,
but I will address cutting costs.
One way to uncover costs is through Value Stream Mapping.
Wikipedia describes Value stream
mapping as a lean-management method for
analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the series of
events that take a product or service from its beginning through to the
customer. At Toyota, it is known as “material and information flow mapping”.
All companies
have processes in place to move from a quote to the customer to delivering a
product or service to collecting cash.
The idea is
to go through all of those processes to look for ways to become more
efficient. Maybe you can eliminate an
activity that doesn’t appear to add any value to the process. Maybe you can find activities that can become
more efficient. Maybe you can automate
some activities. Maybe more control over
your processes can improve efficiency.
Managing Processes to Cut Costs
Some
alternatives include:
A paper based
solution – These are hard to manage and don’t provide good visibility into what
is going on within a process.
BPM [Business
Process Management] software – These provide control and visibility over your
processes. A few of them even allow for
document management [information flows].
PLM [Product
Lifecycle Management] software – These products have process management features
providing control and visibility over your processes. Adding to that, they do a good job of managing
documents [information flows].
Contact me to
learn more about Value Stream Mapping – Let’s see what makes sense for your
company…
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