Process Improvement

Overview

At Callidon, we focus on four closely related techniques to improve overall process effectiveness: process redesign; outsourcing; elimination of activities; and investment optimization. The Callidon team has successfully utilized these solutions to drive significant performance improvement across many businesses and industries.

Strategic Challenges

Unless there is demonstrable failure, companies can be remarkably reluctant to alter processes or to experiment with alternative approaches to completing routine tasks. This is particularly the case with higher margin businesses, where there can be an aversion to anything perceived as jeopardizing revenues.

Such reluctance, however, allows inefficiencies to develop, creating an unnecessary drag on margins. The reality is that rather than processes being honed over time, unless there is a culture of continual improvement, inefficiencies will flourish. These can range from unnecessary steps or hand-offs, resulting in extensive rework and elapsed time to complete a process, to deployment of overly senior or highly skilled staff relative to the complexity of a task, to over or under investment in automation.

At Callidon, we systematically look to redesign and improve processes, through collapsing or reducing or eliminating unnecessary steps, identifying and propagating best practices, benchmarking staff levels and performance or capitalizing on technological improvements. We have considerable experience assisting companies with outsourcing, offshoring, near-sourcing, in-sourcing and all the variations in between. We also work to ensure that levels of investment are appropriate to the opportunity, for example for IT or other capital projects, or for product development initiatives.

Typical Activities

• Map key steps in process. Analyze:
  • Rework loops
  • Unnecessary hand-offs
  • Division of tasks
  • Queues inventory
  • Use of technology
  • Value addition of each activity
  • Other issues
• Develop improvement hypotheses and model impact of alternative process organization strategies.
  • Develop new process
  • Model throughput and efficiency
  • Estimate utilizations
  • Determine cost per unit for each step and overall
• Develop implementation plan for new process
  • Strategy to sell new process to employees
  • Implementation approach
  • New process performance measurements