Turning cost-reduction into opportunity

We have found that utilising a Business Service Management (BSM) approach provides many cost-saving opportunities, plus additional benefits in addition to greater levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

Throughout the transformation approach we recognise and pay close attention to the most critical ingredient of all – people: not only your staff, but also your customers.

The pressure to reduce costs has never been greater than it is now. But reducing costs without adversely affecting your service quality or damaging your business in other ways is not easy.

Complying with enforced budget cuts does not have to mean redundancies, closing branches and ceasing services: it can be seen as a self-funding opportunity to look holistically at your service portfolio and make tactical improvements to your processes and services.

It’s important to understand the targets and expectations from the beginning. We have identified several key elements in the best approach for generating operational efficiencies.

The keys to generating efficiencies:

• Understanding your current costs and current baseline service quality
• Agreeing the required balance of cost and quality
• Taking account of people, processes, partners and products
• Accepting that tools alone will not generate the required benefits – you must effect cultural change
• Using simplification and standardisation as the keys to increased operational efficiency – by creating repeatable standard processes and removing duplication and bottlenecks
• Learning from both positive and negative experiences – too many organisations unrealistically expect their people to get things right first time, without experience

Giving you a tangible return on investment is paramount. Our objective is to deliver self-funding improvements that pay for themselves in months. And if we cannot identify a strong business case in support of a project, we will recommend that you do not proceed any further.