Removing waste

Political alert. This post does have a bit of a political bent, but that is not its focus.

As followers know, we are focused on process improvement in marketing and sales. Removing waste is a HUGE opportunity in most white-collar processes. What our supply chain friends learned long ago, we are still novices at on the demand chain side. An example of backwards thinking was brought home to me the other day in listening to President Obama’s speech on how to cut the U.S. deficit.

One of the recommendations was to use community groups in post hospital care to assure patients don’t need to be re-admitted to the hospital. The incidence of readmittance is high, and expensive and nobody has been able to solve the problem, so they have decided to add “quality control inspectors” at the end of “production line” to assure the work is done right, or make sure rework is done so that re-admission is not needed.

Rather than fix the root cause problem, they will simply attempt to inspect and rework. That mistaken approach was finally rooted out of most U.S. manufacturing operations long ago. Are you still using this approach in your marketing/sales process? I suspect you are. Just look at the multiple approval steps within your process and ask yourself what value they add, or are they just in-process inspection points?

Mitch