Forward thinking organisations, regardless of size and sector, should always be looking for ways to improve. During an economic downturn, the need to be as efficient, effective and as lean as possible, is even more critical and can be the difference between survival and bankruptcy.

Even during recession, people still leave organisations naturally (retirement, ill health, to have a family and so on), so we are not necessarily talking about redundancy situations (though unfortunately it is sometimes unavoidable to help protect the overall business and remaining employees). The simple fact is that the financial resources to replace them when they do go may not exist.

These situations often force a revaluation of how things are done and why; they give organisations opportunities. Quite often the reason cited for working in a particular way is “we’ve always done it that way” or, “a current skills gap is stopping us developing a new system or procedure”

• Complex, spreadsheet systems driving ‘clunky’ monthly sales reports
• Out of date business processes
• Inefficient systems that take valuable time away from productive staff
• Lack of control and visibility of vital documentation / information

Are all examples of inefficiencies a company may be experiencing.

One Design company experiencing a slow down in work, commented:

“We took the opportunity to revaluate our document management processes. We knew that there must be room for improvement but due to the high volume of work at the time, we didn’t have the spare capacity to check it out sufficiently.

The slow down in our work gave us that chance; it was a kind of a positive coming from a negative.
We wanted to make sure that we will be in a good position for when the economic situation improves so we needed to retain our highly committed and professional team of talented staff, after all, they had shown us tremendous loyalty over the years, so downsizing the company was not an option we wanted to implement.
We looked at all aspects of document control and issuing; questioning every step involved using a processing mapping technique.
Was it essential, can it be improved, if so how? It’s quite a liberating process when you start and question everything and let go of certain entrenched processes just because “it’s always been done that way”.

We knew that we had to invest in expertise we didn’t have in house, but we also knew that it was an investment in the long term future of the business and we were absolutely confident of a very rapid pay back.

We ended with a system that far exceeded our initial expectations. Not only do we anticipate that it will return an annual £500,000 saving in fees (incredible as it may seem - I did say we were very confident of a rapid payback!), but we also ended up with a system that gives our project staff instant access to all production information at a click of a mouse.
This greatly improves our response time to queries from our contractors and clients which by default allows us to offer a greater level of customer service.
Client expectation appears to growing at an exponential rate, any organisation not taking advantage of any potential improvement, is really going to suffer, especially in this climate.”

At a business conference the other week, I was talking to a partner of a small firm of solicitors, who, like a lot of businesses, were finding things had slowed down of late. One of his key admin staff had recently retired and though the job was important to the smooth running of the office, cash flow was extremely tight and replacing her and going through the required training etc was just not possible. This obviously impacted on the remaining team though, in terms of extra work and moral.

He decided to get some advice in and use the situation as an opportunity to evaluate their business and processes.

The result, a case load system that costed less than half the first year cost of a new member of staff to implement and that streamlines their work flow to the extent that they no longer need to fill the post.

Economic downturn not the time to invest in a more suitable business system? it actually may just be the best time…...John Dowson, principal business consultant