Schlagwort-Archive: Simplify

Compliance – Life-threatening thrombosis in organizations

Surprise, surprise. As soon as you offend against the law, you make yourself liable to persecution. This is valid for cartels, bribery, embezzlement and all activities otherwise prohibited by law. Additionally companies afford more and more job positions to take care about the formalization of procedures and the appropriate good behavior. The more global an enterprise acts, the more complex become the rules. How can you prevent a life-threatening thrombosis in the procedures of the enterprise?

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An organizational thrombosis is a sickness of business processes. In this case internal regulations pollute the free flow of data, information, deliverables and decisions. If the execution of a process is stopped, then a backlog is build that impedes the actual task that produces products or deliverables. In the worst case it will lead through bad results to an economic infarct. In medical science it is helpful to use medicine that prevents clotting as well as compression bandages, which prevent a growing of the thrombus. What are opportunities that you have in business?

  • Make laws obeyable
    Laws are developed in the interplay of the entire juridical system. It is not possible to recognize all influences from other laws in the respective law. For this reason enterprises should make the interpretation of laws easy for the employees. This enables people to act on the one hand compliant to laws and to do it with little expenditure.
  • Simplify decision paths
    The personal responsibility of leaders that results from the regulations of banks and the stock exchanges led to set frameworks on different decision levels, e.g. budget borders and scope restrictions. It is better to drive as few decisions as possible through the escalation ladder. The subsidiarity principle offers an appropriate approach. Decisions are made on the level of execution. Only, if the respective level is not able to decide by itself, the above level has to be called.
  • Focused use of digital media
    The simple usability of the Internet and email makes it easier for the employees to secure their decisions in all possible directions. Colleagues, who would not be involved in the actual decision, are also forced by respective insinuations to grapple with the resolution (example: „… as far as I understood, I assume that … “). An appropriate E-mail-Governance, which for example forbids decision making via CC as well as extensive CC-address lists or a „zero email tolerance “on weekends, purges the flood of messages.
  • Deregulate
    The number of guidelines grew over the years, without eliminating outdated rules. Most enterprises also do not have a central listing of the internal, external and international regulations. They even do not know the number of regulations. A belated listing does not help. It is a good start, if the majority of regulatory departments are reduced. Thus the rampant growth of new stipulations stops immediately. All internal rules that do not serve the compliance of laws and agreements should be replaced by basic rules, which fix the individual responsibility and self-organization. Afterwards, the remaining guidelines are valid any longer. Now the bureaucracy restarts on a low level.

Bottom line: The right moment to act against a thrombosis is always NOW. Laws become easier and obeyable with less expenditure with the help of practical commentaries. Eventually, it is crucial to streamline the bureaucracy and to resist the natural impulse of intending to regulate the regulatory madness with further regulations ;-).

Abandonment improves the process

Even if we can look back on over twenty years of Business Process Engineering, the business processes are still loaded with activities that waste the scarce means, lead to delays and demotivate the employees. For this reason, there is regularly the need to purge the processes by improving procedures through abandonment.

Prozessoptimierung

In order to facilitate them, the procedures should be available in a documented form. If the appropriate descriptions are missing, one cannot help but to determine the flows with the required details. Already on the highest layer, the process map, possible candidates can be found, e.g. entire areas that can be outsourced. Then, the actual business processes can be scanned for unnecessary process steps by looking at the following aspects.

  • Put the emphasis on core tasks
    Originally, enterprises handled the entire value creation internally, from the steel production, to the finished vehicle. Meanwhile, service providers offer almost all functions as services – from the food supply, to the facility and the vehicle fleet management, to the services of IT and product development.
    In order to align the processes to the core tasks, the strategic core is specified and other functions are outsourced. Only the coordination of external partners remains internally.
  • Simplify activities
    Frequently the procedures are contaminated with old activities that are no longer necessary, e.g. administrating documents or distributing minutes. Since the information is stored electronically, with the appropriate access, the required information is available to the employees at any time.
    The activities can be simplified by constantly using the current IT in various places.
  • Eliminate control tasks
    Depending on the existing culture the processes are filled with controls and rework loops. With the Four Eyes Principle the participants are deprived and the flow is slowed down.
    By dissolving the control tasks, the processes will be faster and the quality of the results increases with the authorized self-control of the participants.
  • Shorten Processes
    The tendency to keep the number of processes small leads to overloaded monsters. Quickly different activities are integrated into one process, e.g. the sales process, the HR process, the development process.
    By looking at the natural breaking points, these monsters can be divided and/or shortened.
  • Delete senseless wasting
    Actually, there are no senseless activities, since there are always unquestionable explanations that show the benefit for the one or the other.
    For this reason all activities should be questioned whether they provide a value-add to the results. If this justification is not comprehensible on an objective basis, the activity should be eliminated without replacement.

Bottom line: Business processes can be designed with less friction loss by abandoning activities. They become faster, obtain better results and give the employees enough time to fulfill the core tasks intently.