Presentation: Banking the dollars
What happened to all those business improvement savings you thought you made? Why can't you see the impact on your bottom line?
Sometimes, business improvement practitioners are guilty of focussing on the means, and losing sight of the ends. They get too focussed on the mechanics of rolling out their improvement methodologies, and don't spend enough time ensuring they make a demonstrable difference to bottom line.
And sometimes the dollars just don't add up. The savings that were estimated at the beginning of the project don't appear at the end, due to such issues as:
- Using "optimistic” assumptions.
- Being inconsistent in the treatment of cost deferrals.
- Double-counting the benefits from over-lapping projects.
- Treating one-off savings as sustained.
- Failing to understand co-commitments required to realise the gains, and
- Making improvements to an area that isn't the bottleneck.
This presentation outlines an approach to address these issues and ensure that the improvements can be tracked to the business bottom line.