When we have the opportunity to help and engage with new clients we look for what appears to be the most obvious and accretive process improvements we can find, or the “low hanging fruit”, and work on those. For a very long time I’ve called this: “Why do anything”? In other words, if I work on something it would great if there was a reason – some expectation of a return on my energy.
I have had a lot of conversations with customers lately about the next steps now that they have matured with our products. The reality is while the first low hanging fruit have been picked there are always more to be discovered. New areas of improvement are being found because they are no longer masked by the inefficiencies of the past.
This low hanging fruit is constantly redefined. As processes are improved, the new low hanging fruit just exposes itself as the next most obvious thing to work on. Let me give you an example. We have a customer that ships thousands of samples out to potential clients as they consider our customer’s products for their projects. As they were going live we worked on the automation of the inbound sample request to generate the pick-ticket for the warehouse, the pack-slip for the customer, and print the shipping labels for FedEx and UPS. The required information to process a sample request used to be manually entered multiple times in multiple systems. This was time-consuming and expensive, so we had our “why do anything” and found the low hanging fruit.
Here’s what was uncovered… When the sample goes out the shipping department adds a business card of the territory representative that would help the customer if they had questions or wanted to place an order. This makes perfect sense of course. So here’s the process: the shipping department looks up what representative would cover the prospect . If they are not sure, they call sales to find out. They put the business card in with the samples and then ship it. Here’s the low hanging fruit: What if the correct sales representative just printed on the packing slip?
This would eliminate looking it up or calling the sales department. This was a simple change that improved the efficiency of sample fulfillment and took just minutes to implement. The key is the organization was looking for the next low hanging fruit.
You’ve seen this labeled as continuous improvement or lean process, but I would say it’s just common sense more than anything else. The science is great mind you, but maybe just paying a little attention to the details, maybe even watching and writing it down, will bear some fruit. There is fruit in your physical processing (Air Breathers) as well as your systems processing (non Air Breathers). One other benefit, if you can make someone’s task easier to perform, it shows you care. Just by chasing efficiency you are recognizing the value of someone’s time and energy as a person and that makes it worth doing.
I can guarantee you, no matter the size of your organization or where your processes are in their maturity, there is low hanging fruit out there. So go pick some.
More From Less 