5 Mistakes to Avoid when Optimizing for Efficiency

As operations leaders, we know the importance of optimizing for efficiency when it comes to our business processes. An efficient, streamlined operation means cost savings that boost the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction, which often leads to additional revenue.

However, it never seems to be an easy or straight path forward and we all tend to make our share mistakes. Today I’ll share five lessons that over the years, I’ve learned the hard way when it comes to optimizing your business processes. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes!

1. Not Documenting Your Processes

Early on, I didn’t think it was all that important to capture documentation for every single process… boy, was I wrong! Without clear documentation, it’s difficult to analyze, evaluate, and optimize your business processes. Ideally everything would be well documented before we get started but if you’re not quite there yet, a great place to start is with process mapping.

Once you have your processes mapped, you’ll want to start documenting each one of them in detail. Include key information such as the purpose of each process, the steps involved, and who is responsible for each step. Don’t forget that part of having well documented processes is reviewing it regularly to ensure that it’s up to date and accurate.

2. Not Communicating Changes Effectively to Employees

This is a somewhat easy one to think you’ve completed but, have not… at least that’s what it was like for me! It took me some time but I finally figured out that I needed to be communicating changes to far more people than I ever expected. Since so many processes and dependent on other processes and often people, bringing more people together to identify and ultimately implement change has had a huge impact on the overall acceptance of the change initiatives that I’ve been a part of.

My best advice here is to start with the “Why” and “What” well before the “How” is talked about. When it comes to implementing the change, having documented training and auditing processes in place will help too.

3. Not Testing Your Processes Before Implementing Them

I’ve shared a few stories in the past about the hard lessons I’ve learned around testing, mostly around quality systems but they apply for process optimization as well. Testing will help you ensure the desired outcome and future process state is achieved before you “go live” with more widespread changes.

Look for opportunities to conduct small-scale tests of your new processes. Then, analyze the results and use that information in a cycle of improvement to fine tune your processes before implementing them department or companywide. As I previously mentioned, this will help you identify and address any issues or inefficiencies before they become major problems.

4. Trying to Optimize Too Many Things at Once

When we start to get people into a continuous improvement mindset, there tends to be an endless supply of improvement ideas flowing our way. This can quickly get overwhelming and you can find yourself trying to optimize too many things at once. Believe me, this is a recipe for disaster! It will slow the wheels of change and you’re far more likely to fail completely.

It’s best to create some sort of idea board so that you don’t loose sight of all of the amazing ideas being generated. It’s also a great place to organize, consolidate, and prioritize all of the ideas on an ongoing basis. You can then use it to identify which processes are the most critical to your business and focus on optimizing those first. Once you’ve optimized those processes, move on to the next most critical processes. This will help you avoid spreading your resources too thin and ensure that you’re making the most impact with your optimizations.

5. Not Measuring the Results of Your Processes

This was a lesson I didn’t learn until later in my career but it’s by no means less important. We had recently completed a Lean Manufacturing 6S project and the team was beaming. While I was proud of the work we had accomplished, I quickly realized that we had never captured the previously chaotic current state of the department. This meant that while we could measure the impact in terms of KPIs we didn’t have any visuals to reinforce those data points.

Some would say the KPIs are the only part that really matters and while I don’t disagree, the fact is that most people are visual and a picture is worth a thousand words! The other point I would add here is that KPIs are great when the language stays among leadership but getting other teams and people who do the heavy lifting like to see the results, not just be told them through KPIs… think about how we often use graphs to share our KPIs.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing your business processes is critical for your company’s success. By avoiding these five common mistakes you’ll be better equipped to achieve your process optimization goals. Remember, the path to success is rarely a straight line, but by learning from the mistakes of others, you can make the journey a bit smoother.

That’s it for today.

See you all again next week!

Dave