It is a challenging time, with the Coronavirus response taking us from "normal" to highly unusual business conditions. Many companies are struggling with decreased demand for products and services and changes to processes in addition to social responsibility to help limit the spread of the virus. There are many difficult decisions that will be made in this dynamic environment and lessons learned that can be leveraged to improve your organization.
Many organizations are working remotely and experiencing challenges that include; communication, connectivity, productivity, having needed reference materials, status visibility, and stress from nonstandard processing. This is a good time to assess lessons learned from the Coronavirus pandemic and to work on your business while demand is down, and resources are available. This could include improving: standardized process for remote processing, paperless processing, the performance measurement system (Key Performance Indicators (KPI), visual trending with targets), 5S (layout, organization, cleanliness), process efficiency, root cause analysis of recurring problems, quality, equipment maintenance, documentation, training, the culture, and facility restoration. Even with employees working remotely there are opportunities to engage them in many of these improvement opportunities. It is highly likely that employees will have a lot of great suggestion on how to improve your "normal" business processes based on their experience dealing with these unusual business conditions.
There is big opportunity to learn from this Coronavirus response and position your company to be more efficient even during "normal" business conditions. In times like this the tendency is to focus on what you can't do; a slight change of perspective may increase awareness of the opportunities that exist. This may be a good time to look at using a standardized assessment that allows you to rate your business versus best in class criteria. By focusing on what you can do now, when your workplace returns to "normal" your business will be able to perform at a higher level of efficiency, quality, and service combined with a better culture for employees.
BPI Experts provides assessments, training, kaizen facilitation, leadership development, and continuous improvement consulting to help organizations optimize all elements of their business. We can help you get through this disruption, capture the learnings, provide recommendations, and create the processes that will minimize the impact of incidents like this in the future. We offer assessments that can be completed remotely or at the facility to assess: paperless processing, leadership, culture, alignment, employee engagement, process maturity, leadership effectiveness, equipment maintenance and performance, training system, as well as facility layout and effectiveness. These assessments will help bring into focus areas where your business can improve. Based on the gaps and opportunities identified you can invest available resources and time to position your organization for a new "normal" and increased immunity against future crisis.
There remains a huge opportunity to go paperless and move towards shared electronic information. There are many software applications that can help you move to a paperless electronic data sharing environment such as Microsoft Teams, OneNote, SharePoint, Skype, Salesforce, and others. The fact is many companies still depend on paper-based processing and emailing information that is only available to individuals, rather than having shared electronic data. I have facilitated the transition to paperless processing for many companies and can assist you in achieving this objective. Paperless processing is much more efficient, saves costs, shortens lead time, improves quality, and simplifies work for employees.