Best Practices

In our modern society we often hear the words "we are building a best in class...", "we are transitioning to best practices operations", "we have enabled scalable solutions so the business can grow their business".

Sometimes I know what this means but as I have experienced growth towards best practices commonly means best practices for that organization. There are standards of operations - but they come at a price. We replace an old "stonehenge" of a transactional order or accounting system with a new ERP or CRM. We enter the business rules into the system and determine that after spending $1MM to deliver it - we can lay off 100 people who used to manually enter all the rules into the system and scan document as graphic representations into the new system. The 100 people are let go - and you hire 25 technical people "off shore" to manage this work from a technical maintenance program. They don't know much about the "on shore" operations and you have put 100 people "on shore" out of work. That's efficiency. We bleed our "on shore" system of operations at the cost of profit. When revenues shrink we find a way to be more efficient with our use of people. There are still human's needed for the organization - but if we could find a way to have all processing "touchless" - we will find a way.

Service providers to this, buyers do this. We are bleeding our system dry. Profit is necessary to buy that new $1MM system that is more accurate. When we discover that we have "outsourced" all of our intelligence - there is a quick fix. A business solution (software and hardware) that enables us to manage all of our processes and maturity on a dashboard that tells us at any point how something is processed.

I am an efficiency expert. I am paid to understand business processes, the rules that define them, the people that own data and systems and processes - and find best practices either with existing resources or with new solutions. Best practices would say that a software program can do away with my job or ship it "off shore" to a less expensive, younger, highly capable person who will be monitored and reported on.

Do we really know what best practices are. With all our evolution - have we dropped something along the way? Another inconvenient truth.