How do you make sure that your operations are as good as they can be? Go out and buy a "best of breed" software or hire a consultant to compare your processes to your competitors?
Although I haven't heard as much about "Best Practices" recently, there still seems to be the philosophy around to try to improve processes by implementing the same methods as the entire industry. This is just another way of ensuring that you are at the lowest common denominator.
For some areas of an enterprise it is important that standards be followed. Who would want to look at a balance sheet that didn't follow accepted accounting principles? But if you are a manufacturing enterprise, your only reason for being is that you manufacture your product better, faster, or less expensively. If you change your processes to be identical to that of your competitor, you are redundant.
If you work for an enterprise who plans to be around for the long term, you need to understand your own processes and improve them in ways that fit. We work with our customers to:
- identify differentiating processes
- simplify and document these processes
- automate the processes to free up employees to create more differentiating processes.
"Companies have defined so much best practice, that they are now more or less identical." -Jesper Kunde, A Unique Movement