Managing resources well is important to all organisations. Efficiency improvements release resources that can be better used elsewhere in organisation and in turn help deliver more value for the customer or the public. Making efficiency gains become even more important when the organisation is faced with falling income levels and there is a pressing need to remain solvent.
Making sensible and sustainable efficiency improvements is rarely easy. Benchmarking can help identify potential improvement areas but they need to be seen in a system-wide context if waste is not to be created elsewhere. There also needs to be a good understanding of what practical operational steps can realistically be taken to deliver the efficiencies and the optimal level of performance that is possible rather than simply making notional cost reductions.
A lot of the knowledge about where there are opportunities to improve and the practical steps required to realise them will be held by front-line staff and managers. However to realise them a short-term project resource is usually needed that can undertake the necessary preparatory data gathering and bring people together to share and combine their knowledge in order to solve the problem. Organisations may also seek external assistance to get access to specialist skills and experience in cost improvement.
We have undertaken many assignments for clients where there is a need to identify and make improvements in efficiency including identifying and evaluating the feasibility of options for improving efficiency, gathering and analysing new sources of data to quantify the scale of improvement possible and working with staff to identify the practical steps needed to successfully realising improvements.