In an example like ours, seeing a cost savings and efficiency gain of 50% or more is common. From the regional manager’s perspective, that cost of 240$ per week can be multiplied by the number of weeks in a year and the number of locations they manage, which in reality would add up to a staggering 149,760$ per year spent asking clients for their address.Ī sharp regional manger might pitch the idea to set up a software system that grabs the phone number calling in to place an order and checks whether or not the address is already on file - that way the price tag of 149,760$ per year can be cut significantly. The regional manager, however, would probably do well to know that number. It’s likely that only the most meticulous and detail oriented store managers would dig into this level of detail for such a small amount. Assuming that this volume of calls comes in for 8 hours out of the day, the unimpressive 6$ per hour comes up to a slightly more noticeable 240$ per week. That means that each location spends 24 minutes per hour on this task, which realistically costs them 6$ per hour on average. Imagine a single PizzaCo location handles a dozen calls per hour, of which 2 minutes are spent getting the client’s info. However at scale, the implications are quite significant. If it takes an employee on average 2 minutes to take down the client’s address and info and validate it, most managers would be tempted to think it’s just a normal task, part of the employee’s activities, hardly worth worrying about. Lets assume for the sake of example that a chain of pizza restaurants, PizzaCo, has a dozen locations and offers pizza delivery all over the city.Įach of PizzaCo’s locations have two people taking orders for delivery earning 15$/hour. This section is about to get very detailed, so if you just want the core of the info, feel free to skip right down to the next section. That’s a very good question and for someone who deals with clients, is probably too simple a step to matter, but from the Business Process Improvement perspective, there are many implications.Ĭase study: Detail-oriented thinking for cost savings Continuing with the example, an employee might ask why it matters to think of details such as “entering the client’s info into the system” after you ask them for it. It can be easy to confuse tasks and activities. Typically tasks make the most sense in context and often make little sense if taken out of context entirely.įrom our invoicing example, we said that collecting the client’s info is an activity that is part of the invoicing process, but from the task perspective, it will involve steps: ask the client for their info, enter it into the system, submit it to the client database. A good way of understanding the concept is to try to think of step-by-step instructions you’d give someone if you wanted them to complete an activity. Tasks, we can assume from what has been said so far, are the lowest level of detail. Simply put, activities are, well just meaningful things we do. For the purposes of Business Process Improvement, it’s best to think of them as the set of tasks that lead to a milestone in a process.įollowing our invoicing example, writing up the actual invoice once we have the details would be a single “activity”, collecting the client’s info would be another, while sending the invoice out would be yet another activity. ActivitiesĪctivities, on the other hand, can be hard to pin down. For the sake of simplicity, most organizations would call it “the invoicing process” and as you can probably guess, it involves all the activities from getting the client’s info, to writing up the invoice with all the details of their order, making sure the client gets it, and collecting the payment. “Invoicing a client” would be a simple example of a process. Processes are easy to understand as a concept, they are simply the entire set of things a company does to deliver actionable items.
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