Eliminating Whitespace Case Study

Client:

Industry: Transportation
Business units affected: Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Billing

Description of the problem situation:

Traditional organizational structure created business silos that prevented full integration of the core business processes. The project was initiated to develop a plan for addressing the following:

Reduce costs in a manner that preserves the company's reputation for service quality.
Eliminate organizational white space between functional areas and the duplication associated with a core business activity, that crossed the boundaries of four separate departments and thirteen individual business units, and reduce associated overhead expenditures.
Improve data sharing and information management.
Pioneer a new and more integrated management oversight process.
Build an in-house capability for structured workflow analysis.

Steps used to resolve the problem:

Phase One: Identified the scope of the project with the President and Executive Management Team, and the in-house team members to participate in the project. The project team underwent teambuilding, project training, and orientation to the project. The orientation involved the Company President, Vice President, and the heads of the four departments that were involved.
Phase Two: Extensive work was conducted to document the current processes, procedures, system requirements, software, personnel and skill sets, and performance indicators associated with the process. The large scope of the project required the development of a color-coded, 12-layered, functional deployment chart that was used to document the tasks that were being performed in sequential order, who was responsible for the performance of individual tasks, what documentation was required, what software and IT platforms were being used, and the performance data that was collected and analyzed.
Phase Three: Redesign the cross-functional process to integrate the five primary objectives, the current performance data, and the re-design initiatives developed by the team. Prior to the re-design, the project team reviewed concurrent organizational projects to ensure coordination of other operational improvements projects.
Phase Four: Create the implementation plan. The team identified the tasks that needed to be performed to accomplish the transition to the new cross-functional process, the resources requirements for the change, and the obstacles to be anticipated.

Description of the Outcome:

Six primary recommendations were made as a result of the team's work. The Executive Management Team approved all the recommendations submitted by the project team.

Develop an integrated information management policy that is "customer centric;" building data files around the customer identification number and populating the files with each transaction in the cross-functional process.
Move the task of "assigning" the customer identification number to the beginning of the process.
Automate the Freight Bill entry activity to eliminate billing errors based upon improper data entry.
Consolidate data management to a single source "data warehouse" with multiple views and controlled entry capability.
Automate the "loading" and "publishing" of pricing information and create faster response time to sales staff. 6. Establish an integrated management team responsible for integration and oversight of the cross-functional activities.
The Executive Management Team also approved the implementation plan associated with the recommendations.

Expected benefits to the client:

The cost associated with re-work will be greatly reduced by moving all reconciliation activity to the point-of-sale and/or the point-of-contact. Many of the errors identified by the team occurred early in the process stream and compounded themselves by creating additional problems as the data moved through the process.
The cost of the duplication and redundancies can be reduced by combining data/information processing and creating shared access through data warehousing.
Data entry errors will be reduced through the application of automated data entry activities. The bulk of the billing errors (58%) were due in large part, to multiple data entry activities and resulted in a total revenue adjustment of -4% per month.
Automated data entry will allow staff in the field to detect errors during customer contact. This will reduce the cost of rework as the bulk of the remaining errors (11%) were attributed to faulty customer inputs. A centralized data warehouse of customer information would eliminate 100% of these errors by providing real time feedback in fields where the data entered and the data stored, did not reconcile.
Creating an integrated management team can reduce white space between departments, providing improved information management and decision-making, which can result in making the process more scalable and ensuring long-term integration of improvements in the future.

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