Bill Gallagher explains how to reduce operational errors by assigning clear ownership of each step in a process, tracking metrics, and paying attention to handoffs. He uses a quote-to-cash example and offers a free process accountability chart to identify where breakdowns happen.
Do you find yourself dealing with more breakdowns and problems and emergencies than you'd like to? It could be that what's next for you to work on then is understanding the core processes of the business. See, when we have clear functions and functional accountability, we start to handle the common kinds of things that companies deal with. Except there's always handoffs between departments. The handoffs between the departments that describe your core functions also can be critical. And that's where breakdowns occur, drops, mistakes, errors in communication, misunderstandings. When a company comes together and discovers that it can make a big difference. Now, one of the companies that we were dealing with had grown very large, very fast, and now had lots and lots like hundreds and hundreds of people working on things. And they'd all done things in special ways across the team. One of the processes that they created or identified and then started to manage was something they called quote to cash. And many of our companies have some version of this that starts somewhere at the very beginning of the sales cycle, just after marketing and the lead gen and that kind of thing, and then goes all the way to the collection of the invoice and deposit into the bank. Right. Well, this company was really great at selling and had grown really fast. But the sales team was so great at problem solving, selling, that they created things that were very hard for the company to implement, an invoice. So in looking at this together now with a clear owner and some metrics on the quote to cash process, the owner had it all the way through as a process. What they identified were these breakdowns. And then all they did or needed to do was pretty simple. They established instead of an infinite number of things that the salesperson might do, they established a menu of things that the salesperson could pull from to solve client problems. And together, pulling those tools in, let them create and implement an invoice of their sales contracts in a consistent fashion. And the problems were quickly solved, the company was eventually sold, and at least that problem was well, solved. I hope this is helpful. The key for you here to look at is the process accountability or pace. We call it process accountability exercise. And in doing that, you'll identify the common or the big core process of the company. You'll establish owners and metrics for those things, and then you can begin to do process work to figure out what the breakdowns are and what the improvements. It's a free download from our website. Hope it's helpful for you. We'll talk to you again real soon.
