How Emerging Markets Transformed Themselves Over the Last Few Decades
From Backwaters to Powerhouses At the start of the 1970s a widely held belief in the United States and in Europe was about how there were no markets outside of their regions. The implication was that the Third World countries were not worthy of foreign investment as they were steeped in backwardness, immersed in poverty, […]
Procurement Management – Procurement of Materials and Resources
Introduction The practice of project management has undergone a sea change in the way it is conceptualized and executed. Gone are the days when the project manager operated in silos without and larger picture focus and without any concern for the environmental and the social costs of the projects he or she was executing. In […]
Step 3B: Choosing the Correct Control Chart (Continuous Data)
Just like there are many types of discrete data charts available, there are also many types of continuous control charts available. The Six Sigma process methodology prescribes which chart must be used when. The prescription in the case of continuous data points is largely based on sample size. Below is the list of the different […]
Warranty Management – Meaning and its Components
Warranty Management had been traditionally viewed by companies as a cost of doing business. The costs of warranty management were found to be costing between 4 to 5 percent of the total sales revenue of the company per annum and were considered to be the cost of providing customer satisfaction and as an opportunity to […]
Modern Day Wage Slavery at Wal-Mart
With an annual turnover of $400 billion, Wal-Mart is usually the biggest company on the Fortune 500 list. Its presence has always been there in the top 5 companies for over the past decade or so. The company is also the nation’s largest employer with more than 1.3 million workers. Also, with the Walton family’s […]
Business Process Improvement programs when designed with specific objectives and sponsored and facilitated by the senior management including Business Unit heads yields the desired results.
Organizations use BPI as a tool to raise the bar and take their business operations to another level. BPI as a tool for effecting change management is effective especially when Organizations are very large, have multiple business units, operate across different geographies and markets. BPI is also highly effective in medium and smaller Organizations which can attempt to overhaul the entire Organizational processes by conducting a BPI program.
The objective or the need for BPI program has got to be decided and chosen by the Business Unit heads and the management of the Organization, for they are the ones who know what they need in terms of their business goals and the need for transition can be defined by them. Apart from Organizational objectives to do with the growth and new businesses, there may be many situations in the current business scenario that can be addressed through BPI.
Customer satisfaction happens to be one of the key driving factors for all Organizations and businesses. All business leaders recognize that their business grows and additional revenues accrue through satisfied customer relationships.
Customer satisfaction encompasses not only quality of product or service and pricing but has a lot to do with delivery as well as after sales service and maintenance too. Therefore Organizations tend to give specific focus to improving their internal as well as external processes that are involved in customer servicing. In many cases the Customer service process currently being followed may be very expensive or time consuming.
Especially in case of sales management, after sales servicing, spare parts delivery, customer complaint management, repair and return as well as warranty servicing and other related areas call for continuous improvement in processes to augment the efficiencies as well as to reduce the costs.
Most of the companies have introduced automated system driven processes for customer relationship management and in case of larger businesses, the entire process has been outsourced to BPOs.
In an effort to improve the business processes, Organizations have adapted the practice of outsourcing the supply chain services using external vendors and supply chain partners. Even in case of field support and warranty supports as well as parts return and repair, Organizations are using multiple vendors to cover the entire market across the county of operation.
When multiple players both internal as well as external are involved and multiple functions as well as departments are involved, managing the efficiencies and ensuring seamless co-ordination is possible only by standardizing and operating through business processes.
Periodically Business process improvement would have to be taken up to streamline processes, to look at redundancies and to introduce new technologies that can automate the processes and thus reduce the costs as well as improve the efficiency of service provided through the network.
However before one embarks on a BPI exercise it is essential to determine and quantify the expected impact in terms of impact on Customer, in terms of Business impact as well as in terms of cost and work efficiency impact too.
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