The Wall Street Journal has an AP article discussing how Emergency Rooms are saving lifesaving minutes when it comes to diagnosing and treating major heart attack victims. Read Here. For every half hour a major hear attack goes untreated the risk of death climbs to 42%. By alerting other departments simultaneously ER doctors can let catheterization labs prepare for lifesaving angioplasty instead of waiting for a cardiologists consult. Other steps included having the cardiologist on staff in the ER.
What I found most interesting was one of the conclusions that stated, "Most [changes] involve internal procedural changes and little costs."
Every business or organization has a workflow. We define workflow as the people, processes, technology and strategy by which work gets done. In this case a procedural shift is helping to save lives. They didn't have to add people or technology but just small changes in what they do! How many procedural changes could your organization make in an effort to save minutes or hours worth of work? Work that can lead to increase costs, reduced revenue...or even death. That may be taking it to the extreme, but for some organizations it's true.
Whether we're trying to change our company or helping one of our customers change...it's the change that's the hardest--not the new procedures, people or technology. It's the fact that we have to try to do things differently.
Consider saving a few minutes a day while working with every customer. Imagine how much time that adds up to? That’s time that could help you investigate newer, better methods.
The key to this is a strategy that is tangible and measurable. If you can measure it you will be able to know if your changes have any effect.
Printing industry association, PIA/GATF, completed a benchmarking study that found a focus on automation in the pressroom and bindery could save up to 1 hour of time for an 8,000 impression job.
The National Association of Printing Leadership implements a Competitiveness eKG survey of printing companies that compares one company to another in an effort to identify areas of customer relationships that can be improved.
Web based order entry and corrections continue to help speed many jobs through a printing plant and back to the customers that requested them.
Again, the key focus is to identify your requirements and see if you can't measure the current state, Make the necessary changes and measure again. It sounds simple but so many will say they don't have time to do it.
One of Murphy's Laws of Commerce states: There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but there is always enough time to do it over. Ah so true.
Take a minute today and look at one aspect of your workflow. See what you can do to make a small change and see if it won't net you a few minutes saved. It could get you out of work 10 minutes earlier on a Friday. If you're feeling kinda bold try applying it to something bigger in your organization--or even your customers business: you never know...it could save your life.
Pass on what you learn to another!
~Peter
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