Converging on the vision through process, people and technology Without doubt the first step in realizing significant growth potential and competitive advantage is to aim your organization's processes at the heart of what creates value for the customer. However, most companies have translated this concept into the mantra of cost efficiency and quality. We have witnessed a wave of continuous improvement and reengineering initiatives that has created scores of lean and mean organizations and yet, for many, the cost savings and improvements in product quality are still to be realized. Far too often the aftermath of a reengineering initiative focused on cost savings is a traumatized organization that performs only marginally better than before. The most successful organizations realize that reducing costs is only a part of the equation.
Process redesign for cost reduction purposes is physically limited to some minimum level.
In one case, we found that if the process undergoing change was reengineered out of existence, it still would have only marginally improved the performance of the business. The conclusion is that reduction-oriented process redesign has a fixed return, while process redesign focused on growth has an almost unlimited return potential. The ideal approach is to constrain costs while focusing on growth-oriented process redesign. Once aimed at your strategic vision, it serves as the foundation for your alignment process. The second aspect of achieving alignment for growth is people.