Today’s companies have to move fast. Open markets, upcoming new competitors and increased sophistication of customers are putting companies under pressure to constantly change.

This puts new requirements on the quality of employees in large organizations. Many people can’t follow the fast pace in organizations any more and those employee’s who are capable to make big changes happen are becoming more and more rare in the market.

Therefore it’s crucial for companies to optimize their business improvement activities as far as they can. Every hour spent on business improvement can’t be put in producing business results vice versa.

We observe that in many companies in Thailand business improvements are still mainly run out of the line organization. What business leaders often don’t see that this kind of ad-hoc improvement is often more expensive than the benefits coming out of it.

Here are some examples why running business improvement only out of line positions is so inefficient:

• Lack of big picture - changes only address needs of one department or are not aligned to overall company strategy
• Lack of skills - the department’s core competency is doing business but not necessarily applying latest management principles, project management practices, etc
• Lack of Focus - improvements are done on top of day to day work. There is either not enough time to do sufficient research and design a high quality solution or worst case, the solution never gets fully implemented
• Lack of collaboration between departments -many problems don’t stop at departmental boundaries. The root for problems is often found department other than the suffering department, i.e. the department with motivation to change can’t convince the department that is causing the problem but doesn’t feel the pain. A good example are problems in revenue collections due to non-signed contracts

The key to success is setting up a Business Improvement Organization. This organization can be virtual or a real line department, reporting to CEO or COO. Experience shows that these kind of organizations can make companies move much faster. BCG estimates three times larger efficiency in implementing real changes in organizations.

The following articles are written for the advanced thinking CEO who wants to get his company to the next level to achieve long-term competitive advantage. Over time we will address specific challenges in organization business improvement initiatives based on our real life experience doing consulting for large companies in Thailand.

Organize your business improvement initiatives - you can expect high ROI on this investment!