There are many ways that an organization can go about retooling their operations and processes to produce a better end product or service. The fundamental challenge in achieving any improvements comes in finding ways to accomplish them while at the same time saving time and money. One such method of unlocking potential performance, while saving both time and money, is that of implementing operational change to your organization’s structures and procedures. “Beyond Headcount Reduction,” a recent article featured in Quality Magazine, written by Peter J. Sherman, lead instructor at Emory University’s Six Sigma Program in Atlanta GA, outlines the principals of operational change as well as the impact it can have on an organization’s output, level of service and ultimately their bottom line.

Sherman begins by first addressing the fact that the majority of businesses today are in an extremely defensive posture as a result of the recent decline of the economy. With many organizations having eliminated staff, froze salaries, cut hours, reduced overtime, and cut back services, the general solution to managing business during the recession has been to reduce workforce and freeze spending in order to cope and hopefully come out on top. Sherman believes that near-term solutions like these will ultimately have a negative impact in the long-term. He suggests that reducing costs and headcount will likely cause organizations to enter into an endless cycle of quality issues and declining revenues, while at the same time leading to future pressure to reduce costs again and again. A more effective solution, according to Sherman, is to implement operational change. As Sherman states, “Rather than solely focusing on reducing costs and headcount, operational change is needed to unlock performance and create real and sustainable value for an organization. Operational change means looking within to change and improve business processes in order to save money.” More basic than applying process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma, lean or ISO 9000 standards, operational change is equally effective for both small businesses and large corporations regardless of industry. Operational change is essentially looking at your organization from the inside and identifying and improving core operational processes in order to obtain the same or an improved level of service or output with lest cost.

In order to achieve operational change, Sherman offers four management principles that when implemented will help to unlock performance within your organization. These principals cannot be applied overnight but rather must be implemented layer by layer systematically in order to benefit fully from them. Sherman’s four principals are as follows:

Layer 1 – STANDARDIZATION
Although standardization is sometimes viewed as a deterrent to innovation, it plays a critical role in streamlining operations and initializing the implementation of operational change. Seemingly an obvious principle, many large companies have just begun to apply standardization in order to foster a consistent customer experience and reduce operating costs. Standardization should be applied to areas of operation where there are inconsistencies within processes that directly increase cost.

Layer 2 – INTEGRATION
Integration is the second principal involved in executing operational change. Having systems and processes in place that can accommodate any new product, regulation change or new growth will ultimately lower costs and save time. Having to manage work-arounds and one-offs becomes tedious and costly. The ideal operation should consist of a seamlessly interlinked set of systems and processes to support the full customer life cycle from sales to billing to delivery to customer service.

Layer 3 – CENTRALIZATION
The third principal is centralization, which Sherman defines as removing redundancies and achieving economies of scale. More simply put, centralization implies organizations performing like functions in fewer locations with fewer suppliers or venders. Some typical operational functions that centralization can be applied to are advertising, accounting, purchasing, human resources, information technology and legal.

Layer 4 – OPTIMIZATION
Upon completion of implementing the processes of standardization, integration and centralization, your organization should have experienced some transformational challenges. At this point it is important to optimize performance in order to maximize value. To achieve sustainability, continually streamlining systems and processes is imperative and applying proven process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma and lean can be effective at this point.

Implementing operational change through Sherman’s four management principles offers one approach to improving an organization’s level of service and output and ultimately increasing the quality of their products and customer experiences. A web-based Quality Management System like the one offered by Intelex Technologies in conjunction with the implementation of operational change will provide any organization a comprehensive and easy to implement solution for tracking, monitoring and reporting all quality issues throughout the transformation process and beyond.

We're pleased to announce that Intelex has been chosen by Telenor Pakistan to provide them with a web-based software solution designed to address all aspects of an effective telecommunications quality management program including document control, nonconformance and corrective-action tracking, and audits management, etc.

Telenor Pakistan is a subsidiary of Telenor ASA – a telecommunications service provider in 13 countries across Europe and Asia. Since its launch in 2005, Telenor Pakistan has become the single largest direct European investment in Pakistan to date, which as a result has contributed to its success as the fastest growing mobile network in the country, with coverage reaching deep into many of the most remote areas of Pakistan.

When Telenor Pakistan began shopping for a software provider, they identified several requirements for the solution that would best meet their needs, the top three being an easy-to-use document control system, a reliable audits management program, and the ability to streamline TL9000 initiatives organization-wide. We knew that our out-of-the-box quality management system didn’t address TL9000 requirements so we used our iForms^® technology to build custom forms and reporting capabilities that would comply with TL9000.

"In what is an exciting, fast moving market, Telenor Pakistan always needs to be ready to meet growing market demands and offer reliable and robust services that our customers demand of us. Choosing a TL9000-based QMS is a step in that direction. TL9000 includes all the ISO 9000 requirements, and 90 additional requirements specific to the telecommunications industry. However, what really sets TL9000 apart from ISO 9000 are the set of measurements, which can be benchmarked globally under various product categories. We selected Intelex because it's QMS, iForms^®, and reporting software could be easily configured to manage the TL9000 measurements, in addition to the standard requirements of ISO 9000. We look forward to a rewarding partnership between Telenor Pakistan and Intelex Technologies," said Khalid Shehzad Chief Technology Officer of Telenor Pakistan.

"Telenor Pakistan has only been around since 2005; however, in just four years they've become the dominant player in the telecommunications industry in Pakistan. They have experienced tremendous growth over the last few years by dedicating themselves to providing their customers with a superior product and customer service," commented Mark Jaine, President and CEO of Intelex Technologies Inc. "Implementing the Intelex Quality Management System with iForms^® is just another way for Telenor Pakistan to solidify their commitment to providing high-quality services."

The purpose of a quality management system is to enable continual improvement regardless of market conditions; therefore, organizations that had the foresight and business smarts to have implemented effective quality management systems prior to the current recession have been proactively refining their business processes, minimizing the potential for nonconformance expenses, and enabling complete performance visibility as opposed to implementing last minute reactionary decisions intended to cut costs quickly. Invariably the "quick fix" approach to reducing the bottom line will directly impact product and service quality, which will ultimately have a negative impact on revenue generation.

The article "Prepared for Battle: Defend yourself in any economy with sound quality management" by Peter Grossi in this month's Quality Progress magazine delves much more deeply into the concept that businesses with existing quality management programs are better positioned to adapt during difficult economic conditions. "What organizations need to keep in mind, however, is that while the impact of a recession may be significant from a psychological perspective, in reality the application of sound quality management principles has a much more significant effect on an organizations success than the state of the economy."

So where does that leave businesses that don't have a quality management program in place? It leaves these organizations with a significant opportunity to improve their performance and strengthen their business operations so that they too can prosper regardless of the economic climate.

To read Peter Gross's complete article please visit the Quality Progress website. For information on the Intelex Quality Management System you can register for a live demonstration or free trial access online.

The discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained considerable momentum in recent years with all signs indicating that this movement will continue with even greater force throughout the remainder of 2009 and into 2010. Business leaders that have had CSR programs up and running for several years will tell you that when their programs started there was very little measuring and reporting on established objectives, but with sophisticated consumers and stakeholders demanding greater accountability gone are the days of just saying "it's working."

A general framework for CSR reporting has been established by The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a large multi-stakeholder network of thousands of experts, in dozens of countries worldwide. Intended to inform shareholders, stakeholders and the general public of all efforts to adhere to laws and ethical standards as well as any improvements to the sustainability of the company and the environment, CSR reports are a means of increasing the transparency into an organizations operations, which some say will spur other companies to further action. As the GRI's website (www.globalreporting.org) describes, "The Global Reporting Initiative's vision is that disclosure on economic, environmental, and social performance is as commonplace and comparable as financial reporting, and important to organizational success." On an organizational level CSR reports can be useful for companies to benchmark organizational performance, demonstrate organizational commitment to sustainable development and to compare organizational performance over time.

Celeste LeCompte investigates some of the ideas surrounding CSR reporting in a recent article on BusinessWeek.comentitled "How to Put Sustainability on the Books." The issue at the heart of LeCompte's piece is not so much what types of data organizations are including in their CSR reports but rather how they are collecting and then extracting this data. As DeCompte explains, "CSR data are notoriously complex. Putting together a report can mean pulling data from environmental health and safety departments, community and education programs, philanthropic giving records, supply chain partners, and operations records. Historically, companies have pulled that data into Excel spreadsheets to create new datasets for CSR reports. But as stakeholders—and shareholders—show more interest in sustainability concerns, companies are beginning to eye more sophisticated software to help them manage and report that data." Because collecting, verifying, and publishing data from multiple spreadsheets and various other sources is an obvious limitation on the accuracy and efficiency of a CSR report, a more sophisticated, web-based software solution such as what Intelex offers is something that many organizations have now implemented to streamline operations and make data reporting more accurate and manageable, a trend that will likely continue to increase as we move towards a more accountable, socially and environmentally conscious business world.

Intelex Technologies has released its latest software innovation, the Intelex OpenPass API, a revolutionary application programming interface that will enable its users to sync and report data between multiple business management systems.

The Intelex OpenPass API functions as a conduit for seamlessly feeding data between multiple software programs. This means that Intelex’s environment, quality, and health & safety, and business management Software can now share data with pre-existing business software applications; thereby, saving time and resources while maintaining a degree of accuracy that’s difficult to achieve when data is transmitted manually.

The City of Calgary and St. Gobain are the first Intelex clients to take advantage of the OpenPass API.  The City of Calgary used our OpenPass API to import employee and location data from their pre-existing HR system into their Intelex System. They also used the OpenPass API to export employee injury data (i.e., incident number with date and time stamp) from Intelex’s Master Incidents Module into their HR program.

St. Gobain used the OpenPass API to import training courses, employee lists, and employee workgroup data from Lotus Notes into the Intelex System and Training Management Module. By using the OpenPass API St. Gobain was able to quickly populate their new Intelex System with historical data that will be a key factor in reporting accuracy and trending.

If you think that your organization could use the Intelex OpenPass API to import, export, and sync data between a pre-existing management program and your Intelex System, send an email to client.relations@intelex.com or call 416.599.6009 for more details.

Free Operational Control Scorecards and Configurable Reports are now available on the Intelex-Exchange.  Click here to read up on how to import these tools directly into your Intelex System.

SCORECARDS

Operational Control - Current Year Scheduled Equipment Maintenance
Operational Control - Overdue Equipment Maintenance

CONFIGURABLE REPORTS

Operational Control - Equipment Maintenance List
Operational Control - Scheduled Equipment Maintenance next 90 days
Operational Control - Upcoming Maintenance by Person Responsible
Operational Control - Equipment Maintenance History
Operational Control - Overdue Equipment Maintenance