- Integrate Industry Benchmarking to Set Goals: Continual focus on raising the bar and setting new standards of excellence is a requirement for top-quartile performing firms.
- Implement Workflow: Using workflow technologies streamlines and automates operations while eliminating redundant tasks.
- Knowledge Management: Create a central repository and library of all your best practices, processes, documents, and data. Online technologies such as Wiki’s have made this cost-effective for small businesses.
- Operational Metrics: Employees that know and measure themselves against operational metrics are more aligned with the businesses’ financial goals and objectives.
- Labor Analytics: Reduce turnover costs, overtime, and PTO (Paid-Time-Off).
- Change Management: Often overlooked, change management is the critical factor for adopting any new process or system.
- SLA’s and Expectations: (SLA’s is the abbreviation for Service Level Agreements.) When one says “I got everything I wanted at the negotiating table," they lost. In successful negotiations there are winners only when two parties who have arrived at a mutually beneficial and sustainable arrangement.
- Executive Oversight: Provide insight and visibility into daily outputs and results through reporting and analytics.
- Decentralization: Empower front-line staff and push down decision-making to the periphery.
- Need for Integration Between Applications: For example, the financial accounting software shows the detailed picture of the financial status of the company. But often businesses need to analyze trends to see where improvements can be made in service and sales. Most businesses are forced to mine different systems, rely on Microsoft Excel, and thus always review historical / data (lagging indicators) as opposed to leading indicators (trends).
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