Cutting costs: Maximizing results
Why You Should Cut Costs for your organization
Cutting costs is often employed strategy organizations see immediate improvement in revenue. In tight times, a deep dive examination of how you are spending money, processes involved, delay within the processes and how you can correct your course can yield substantial and sustainable results.
First, look to enhance efficiency.
Maximizing efficiency can yield great results in the battle to cut costs. Not always does reducing your manpower which is often what organizations tend to do results in achieving your goals. To become a lean enterprise, it is important to identify internal processes and resources and you can quickly see its impact on operations and costs.
Enhancing efficiency requires knowledge and keen understanding of the business operations and willingness to update the processes where required and use technology to support them.
Using Automation where necessary to automate repeatable process thereby freeing up your resources time to invest in revenue building activities or eliminating unwanted or low value processes altogether can result in savings. By adopting technology, you can turn a time-consuming, laborious task into a quick, efficient process leaving your employees with more time to spend on increasing profitability instead of paperwork.
You can start with interviewing team members where most of the time is spent and understand the why. Using a simple technique like the 5 why technique can help you understand the root cause of issues.
Second, automate where feasible.
Use technology to handle a repetitive task so your team members can invest time in problem solving and value creation activities.
Third, collaborate with others.
Use collaboration tools available free or with minimal cost to collaborate in real time with team members to create a sense of partnership, engagement and transparency.
The above is the starting point to build an organization full of engaged team members and start the journey towards a becoming a truly lean enterprise.