Organizations must continuously improve their processes and increase efficiency in order to stay afloat in a globalized economy. Fortunately, American businesses can become sustainable organizations capable of competing in a global marketplace, by implementing a variety of cost reduction techniques and making business process improvements to increase operational efficiency.
Importance of Employee Suggestions in a Cost Reduction Strategy
Your employees are the driving force behind your organization and are valuable assets to the company. Utilize their knowledge and experience by asking them for suggestions or feedback as to how you can improve the business. Your employees are the first point of contact for customers and represent your company. While you may be implementing productivity and efficiency policies upstairs, they could have a negative effect on the floor.
According to recent studies, only 41 percent of employees think their managers listen to their ideas, which hinders innovation and leads to detrimental communication problems down the road. The same study indicates 37 percent of respondents felt their company’s management was inaccessible to them. Suggestion programs have a bad name because corporations would implement – but never listen to – employee suggestions, which is why 60 percent of respondents indicated their company’s suggestion program was inefficient.
Employees experience your business from a different perspective, offering profit building advice and feedback about company policy you – or your colleagues – developed to increase efficiency. You can only derive so much information from facts and figures, which is why employee suggestions are vital to your business’s success. A research firm calculated each employee suggestion to be worth $6,000 in a cost reduction strategy, with small and large companies seeing savings of more than $300,000 annually, with only a 54 percent participation rate. Each suggestion sparks innovation and decreases operational expenses and supply costs. Each idea saves a little money, time, makes their job easier, improves customer satisfaction, or in some way makes the business more efficient.
Why Use Employee Suggestions?
Employee suggestions improve your business by building teamwork, removing barriers, saving money, boosting morale, and ensuring compliance with government regulations. Suggestion programs increase cost reduction efforts and inspire employee confidence by showing them you care about their ideas. Those employees frustrated with the current administration have an outlet to voice their concerns in a non-threatening environment. The suggestions spearhead cost reduction efforts by increasing efficiency while reducing expenses. The suggestion programs also ensure your organization is compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires companies to allow employees to submit anonymous messages to the company’s review committee.
Business Process Improvements
View your company as an intricate system of processes, each of which works together to create a product or service. Business process improvements and cost reduction strategies work together eliminating waste, increasing productivity, maximizing effectiveness, and reducing labor costs. Each action your organization takes to produce a product or service is a process. Use employee feedback in addition to cost reduction in order to simplify, merge, and remove wasteful processes that are not profitable.
Employees are the people executing your business processes, thus they have the knowledge and information to expedite the process. They are the experts regarding the manufacturing or production process and should be treated as such. Use their suggestions and match them with the appropriate business processes. Once the suggestions are matched appropriately, analyze the current process in comparison to the employee’s suggestion. Implement the proposed change if it saves time, money, or human resources without interfering with rigid quality control standards.
Use Technology to Monitor Suggestions
Technology automates and streamlines the process of improving your business using employee feedback. The software applications enable businesses to input their current processes into the system and modify the processes using the employee suggestions. A simple What-If report analyzes the suggestions and determines whether the changes are profitable, saving the company additional capital investment on trial and error. The programs simulate the events before they occur, reducing implementation costs and improving productivity.
The suggestions can be deployed immediately and are compared to the previous implantation. Employers tweak and modify processes based on employee suggestions and policy documents. The software programs offer a low cost of implementation and high returns of investment. Depending on the solution your business chooses, BPM programs define, analyze, and document business processes, improve operational effectiveness, build innovative solutions, and provide detailed reporting and metrics.
Cost Reduction: Surviving in a Globalized Economy
Globalization and the Internet create a global marketplace that allows customers to shop from stores around the country. Globalization is a threat to American businesses and requires companies to gain the competition by offering the lowest prices possible. For cost reduction to work, companies offer lower prices on their products while lowering internal costs. Increase revenue generation by eliminating wasteful business processes, lowering labor costs, reducing supply expenses, and increasing sustainability.
Organizations can significantly reduce their supply costs via cost reduction. Raw materials and supplies are business expenses that can – and should – be minimized to increase revenue. Engage with the suppliers or vendors to create a cost effective strategy for your organization by using managed inventory programs, reducing shipping and transactional costs, decreasing lead times, and reducing the amount of inventory you carry at any given time.
Cost reduction strategies indicate monitoring the business process work flow for inefficiency which can reduce labor costs. Reevaluate your staffing needs by pairing each employee with a business process, and determining sustainable work levels by monitoring the floor. Avoid over and under staffing as each lead to decreased profitability through conflict. Consider removing or merging inefficient processes in the organization in order to streamline the process, automating as many tasks as possible.