Imagine a woodsman cutting trees with an axe. The more trees he cuts, the duller grows the axe blade. This increasingly slows the woodsman down, but sharpening the axe takes an hour, and that's an hour that could be spent cutting trees.

At some point, it makes sense for the woodsman to stop and sharpen the axe, because eventually the axe becomes too dull to cut at all, and sharpening it will boost his productivity enough to make the investment worthwhile.

A business process is just a tool, and should be treated like one. Doing things one way may have been enormously productive when first adopted, but over time, with the introduction of new tools, new teams, and new procedures, old processes start to slow you down, or even stop you dead in your tracks.

The first step in turning around an unproductive business process is to define it! It's astonishing how many critical business processes are run on oral tradition within a corporation, or what could be called "tribal memory". Many of them have never been written down, never been discussed, never even been looked at, let alone analyzed and engineered for efficiency.

Defining a business process is as easy as defining the objective, interviewing the performers, and creating a flowchart illustrating every step in the process. Our experience is that once this is done, efficiencies fairly leap out at you!

North Pacific can take your business processes from "the way we've always done things" to best practices in less time than you might imagine. The potential cost savings and improvements in staff morale, customer service, and business efficiency can pay for themselves almost immediately in a more economical, tightly run company.

Contact us for more information: process@north-pacific.ca