Project Initiator:
Managing Director
Assignment Period:
Oct 2005 – Ongoing
Applied Australia business need:
We had a significant and long standing cost and process control issue with the way in which we administered our dispensing equipment free-on-loan to our clients. We needed a very structured, disciplined solution to drive the right behaviours indelibly into our process. We also recognised that most of the way we measured things in our business was classically “lagging indicator” – we needed to get on the front foot with some leading indicators.
The Next Level Business Solution:
The Next Level helped us map the process “as is”, identify the value destroyers (at the root cause level), workshop the process and business rules changes with the relevant managers, map the process “to be”, highlighting the process changes, new business rules, implications for new tools, and initial measures. Some of these changes showed further opportunities for improvement in our broader salesforce effectiveness and in the way in which we tap into customer feedback. The Next Level is now assisting us make improvements in our processes in these critical areas as well.
The Results So Far:
The disciplines and business rigours now in place transcend the initial focus of the way we deploy dispensing equipment to our clients. We have seen reduction in credit claims due to incorrect pricing, and we are benefiting from new revenue generation from both equipment and the installation service. In addition to the very obvious tangibles such as documented policies and procedures, we can see the associated cultural understanding and changes taking effect across the organisation. Customer receptivity has also been positive at this stage. Staff across the sales, customer service, accounts finances have had time freed up from low value adding rework to more valuable activity – in fact we would estimate that up to a quarter of our total staff pool would now be at least 10% more productive, with some groups experiencing double that level of increase.
Looking Ahead:
We look forward to entrenching the changes and the sustainability of the business benefits. The Next Level will assist us through this next phase, which includes building our customer facing scoreboard, measuring the critical activity inputs and service outputs to customers, both internally and as scored externally by our customers.