I have been charged with designing and implementing a program which saves the company a recurring $1 million dollars annually. This cannot be achieved through hard cutbacks. It must be gained in process improvments and streamlining. They intend to obtain these improvements from the employees themselves through individually submitted ideas or departmental think tanks.
Gain Sharing being a primary motivator, if an employee can definitively identify an area of improvement and calculate cost savings, they will be rewarded with a percentage of that savings.
Does anyone have any thoughts, comments, resources, models, links, etc etc on this??
I am all for the idea of employees taking notice and responsibility for process improvement. I get a little uneasy about payouts, the structure of such a program has to be very tight. I see this essentially as a 3 part process initially.
1. Teach employees how to evaluate and discuss process improvement.
2. Empower them (or set up for them) collaborative sessions to attack improvement issues.
3. Determining a viable reward program.
My biggest concern is that we get this employee involvement thing rolling and wind up with a bunch of employees working for a bonus, instead of instilling in the workforce an ethic and framework for improving continuously.
So.......(hopefully i have not been too unclear or rambled :)
A little help would be appreciated being pointed in any direction you see fit.
Bill Saving Changes...
Michael WoodProject Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent ContractorGig Harbor, Wa, United States
Bill,
Hold the presses. What you are venturing towards is a continuous improvement model based on silos not based on end to end value delivery processes. However, with a little recalibration you can most likely accelerate the quality, value and deployment of improvements. First get management to help you define some very operationally tangible objectives. Next, identify the operational areas that are impacted by each objective. Most likely these operational areas will span functional silos. Instead of departmental groups organize your focus groups into cross functional process groups that mirror the value delivery systems. Then, assign facilitators (after some have been trained) to Shepard the group’s through a series of work sessions that achieve the following:
1 GAP Analysis that identifies the current operational practices, policies and procedures that inhibit their ability to achieve the objectives provided. Associated to each stumbling block have the group collectively identify what would have to change in order to enable the organizations ability to streamline the function so that the objective could be achieved. Be sure to make both statements measurable in terms of
? What happens
? When it happens
? How often it happens
? What goes wrong because of it
? The cost
? Etc.
2 Next have the facilitator work with the group to map out the current workflows and to map the current issues from the GAP analysis to actual work procedures. This will help pinpoint where specific changes need to be implemented.
3 After the workflow is modeled and mapped to the GAP analysis have the group develop a new conceptual workflow that implements the ideas from the GAP analysis for streamlining the operational area.
4 Next map the GAP analysis to the new workflow to insure you haven’t left anything out.
Now you have a road map that takes you from the NOW way of doing things to the Future way of doing that was driven by the employees. You also have quantitative data to develop the business cases needed to justify the changes. You also have buy-in and momentum to fuel change. Finally you have the basis to parse the operational change goals back to the participating departments and the metrics needed to implement performance score cards.
Each Group should be able to do this whole process in a month or so based on a series of 2 to 3 hour work sessions once a week.
As for rewards I would develop a bonus centered MBO program based on achieving the objectives identified and measure effectiveness based on the performance score cards.
There is more on the analysis side of the above 4 points like Failure Analysis, Process Stimulus Trigger Analysis and Object Transformation Analysis that could be done to enhance the effort but those are too detailed to discuss in this space.
Also be very selective on the modeling tools you choose. Be sure the models are virtually syntax free and easy to understand by those not participating in their development.
I sure wish you luck and don’t be shy about asking for help.
