Don’t let hidden costs damage your profits

When a business is embarking on a project, that will fundamentally change the way the organisation works, there are a number of steps to go through in order to properly identify the business aspirations and to understand exactly how change will impact the business. But these projects don’t tend to focus on finding hidden costs.

Typically, when the Skore team are called in to support this type of transformation project, our client will already have a specific goal, such as implementing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

As a client you will have acknowledged that you have recurring problems, often including; the duplication of effort, repeatedly making the same mistakes, or simply not being able to keep on top of things with your existing working practices. But what other hidden costs might be lurking in the business?

Perhaps the system being implemented promises a new feature that will allow you to exploit a new process – for example, a client recently benefited from the introduction of an online chat widget, meaning that customers were able to interact directly with the support staff through the website.

In 2017, we published this article How we saved 80 days of waste during a system implementation. This project saw our client, a tier 1 engineering company, implementing a training administration system to manage the multitude of internal and external training courses they offer.

With well defined goals for the system implementation, Skore was selected for gathering the requirements. During the early project stages of the initial requirements workshops, we quickly identified the aforementioned extra 80 days of hidden cost!

Using that article as the catalyst, we decided to review other projects we’ve been involved in and see what additional benefits we helped our clients achieve.

Another client engaged Skore to support the definition of business processes in preparation for the implementation of a new order processing system. During the definition phase, we once again identified a number of improvement opportunities outside the scope of the core project, including time savings in the processes for ordering, stock management and returns.

The Skore approach also helped the team identify areas where data duplication was taking place. By addressing these instances, further time efficiencies were achieved through the reduction of duplicated effort and rework.

In our third example, the project looked at the clients’ product development process. A key factor in using the Skore approach is the detailed understanding of the interactions between all interfacing processes, people and technology. It was within these interfaces our client identified additional pain points that were adversely impacting their customer experience. The additional value added by Skore was being able to assist with resolving these problems outside of the core project.

This is just a small sample of our projects. However, our ongoing review process found one common theme – that additional benefits are consistently being identified outside of the defined scope of our projects.

What is most surprising, is that in virtually all cases, these unexpected benefits represent a significant cost saving to the client despite never having previously been identified. In fact, the teams were often not even aware they had a problem until the Skore approach was applied.

This is why the use of Skore tends to grow within organisations. After its initial introduction as a tool to support the delivery of a specific project, its value in identifying additional, or unexpected, benefits soon becomes clear. Skore can easily be applied to other parts of the business in order to optimise working practices, reduce costs, identify new opportunities and, in turn, increase profits.

To find out more about how Skore is helping organisations transform their performance and customer satisfaction, take a look at our case studies.

Or, to discuss how Skore could be applied to your own business, leave your details for one of our transformation specialists to arrange a call.