The Power of SIMPLE

 

 

From the moment we wake up and start navigating through our morning, day, week, months and so on we interact multiple times with hundreds and thousands of processes while dealing with businesses, government agencies, retailers, health service providers, school systems, and well, you name it and it is there. From how we pump gas at the station to the way we satisfy our everyday needs and what we do at work; we interact most of the time unknowingly with countless different processes some of them very friendly, intuitive, clear and SIMPLE while some of them are unnecessarily complex, time consuming, expensive and frustrating, it is then when we start thinking about why is this not made SIMPLE?

​

There is a belief that automation makes things easier, cost effective and particularly faster, which is absolutely true more so for millennials and younger people than for previous generations and so there is a gap in the perception of what SIMPLE really is. If you are navigating the route that only through technology you can simplify things you better think again, while undoubtedly we are entering a more technologically dependent world there is large world population that does not use technology for commercial purposes even though the use of internet for social purposes is on the rise according to Pew Research Center.

​

More often than not simplicity has a lot if not everything to do with trust, an important high end shoe and leather goods manufacturer and retailer had a policy on returned items that was not known by their sales associates and managed by each store manager only, these situations could only be handled in the store where the purchase had been made, and by any mean cash reimbursement should be used only as a last and final resort and if that happened to be the case performance of the store and the particular manager where to take a major blow, if there was reason to believe there was something wrong with materials or assembly then the items had to be sent back to the manufacturing facility where the Quality Assurance team would verify and the Quality Assurance Manager had to make a final decision on exchanging or repairing the item which then would be sent back to the store to have the store manager handle the situation with the client, this took about 80 days.

​

First, the procedure itself was written ignoring the client, its satisfaction and experience and probably anyone who had gone through this exercise never went back to buy with these stores, second the cost of having these items being sent back and forth multiple times was never taken into consideration, that added to the time that countless people had to handle the product, write reports or communications about it, and distract their attention from their core responsibilities; This whole process made it far more expensive than just giving the client an instant refund or a new item and let him be happy with the experience of a satisfying and SIMPLE way of doing business with the store. The lack of trust in the customer and store personnel and  the intention of finding an offender were the driving forces of this process, when the process was redefined and corrected it was calculated that the bottom line results of this initiative was equal to the annual profit of one of their average size stores.

​

There are SIMPLE to implement solutions for every process you might think of, if you have traveled internationally you have seen how the same thing gets done differently; in some cases way more complicated and in others it is so SIMPLE that you don’t even give it a second thought, like having your bag checked in at the Lima Peru airport vs doing the same with the same airline in Bogota, Colombia or Seattle, WA. There is an opportunity to simplify whenever you hear something like “That is the way is done in this country” and that usually has to do with adapting to an inefficient environment vs bringing efficiencies to the status quo.

​

When it comes to internal business processes sometimes it gets very ugly, the disconnect between areas that have created rock hard silos make it so difficult to streamline and optimize that more often than not corporations decide to live with the problem and the associated costs because that is just the way it is and it has worked well for a long time, so much that improving it is just not worth it. One midsize bank in North America had three different major accounts receivables areas, each one reporting to a different Executive and each one with a rather important structure that supported their own particular operation, now being this a back office not entirely regulated function once the problem identified you’d figure corrections should be rather SIMPLE to implement, nothing further from the truth, strongly engrained beliefs made enough of a business case to keep things unchanged in each situation, separation made sense for each party and they could individually demonstrate they had effective processes in place. Unfortunately when you looked at these areas from a much higher perspective the overlaps, repetitions and excessive cost was obvious, defining the corrections was a rather quick exercise, now implementing it took 80% of the time and effort, and the benefit in speed, relationships with third parties and cost optimization were major, as the CFO stated “ I had tried to tackle this issue several times but since no one internally had any motivation to change it took a set of eyes with a different perspective to finally make a SIMPLE more effective process work, and on top of that the financial benefit was much sweeter than I had anticipated”

​

More often than not leaders fall in the trap of buying technological solutions before they take the time to define what they want their process to look and feel like for their customers or end users, whenever you are in this situation make sure you start from the end result and build back from it and always take into consideration that the business perspective from people ‘unfamiliar’ is of the most value when challenging paradigms you might not even be aware of.

​

By: Cristopher Del Angel, CEO at To The Top Management Consulting