An FMCG company in Asia called us in to improve its operational agility in a context in which it sought to accelerate growth and increase its operating result in the following 5 years. Up to that moment, they had been operating with very slow, bureaucratic processes, as well as with many instances of control, which slowed down growth. We worked together to identify which areas and processes had the greatest impact on the agility of the operation and which had the greatest opportunity, and to decide together which ones to optimize.

Context

On many occasions, efforts are invested in improving and optimizing processes, without being clear to what extent this optimization will bring agility to the general operation of the company.

Our client had a great growth opportunity, but in order to achieve it, they needed to streamline the company: have more efficient and flexible operating processes that are resilient to changes and allow resources to be quickly reallocated. They identified that their processes had been designed in another context, with another technology, and only small adaptations had been made over time without ever rethinking them from a zero-based perspective.

Approach

Using the “Operating Agility Framework”, we were able to measure the degree of agility of the processes and thus be able to determine which ones had the greatest impact on the global operation and, in turn, a greater area of opportunity to be optimized. Based on this analysis, together with the client, we decided which were the key processes on which we would focus.

Then we worked with a multidisciplinary team to reconfigure these processes, simplifying them, eliminating activities with little added value, making them faster and less bureaucratic.

Results

Finally, we were able to simplify the key processes, obtaining results in effort and time reduction of around 20%, which streamlined the company’s operation and enabled an acceleration in growth. In turn, as a result of this teamwork, it was possible to transfer the methodology used to continue optimizing processes within the organization.