Find broken processes
MACTEC had long taken a particular approach to reviewing contract risks, but Massey saw a problem with it.
“That process was broken and too expensive, …” she says. “It was something we had been doing six, eight years, and it had kind of spun out of control in terms of the amount of time people were spending in review of contracts on the operations side.”
So she pulled together a team to address that process, which is one of the first things you have to do to improve your business in tough times. The team consisted of operations people as well as the head of the legal group, the quality manager, the chief engineer and select others.
“It was people that were touch points in the process,” she says. “We had sign-offs or approvals that involved three or four different groups, so I put people from those groups onto the team. I didn’t want to miss anything that was necessary, so I knew if I had representatives from those different groups that they would each make their argument as to why they should be involved in the process.”
When you put a team of different personalities together, that’s when you’re going to get the best results.
“Ultimately, the buck stops with me, but I find that the best ideas do not come from me — they come from the people that I surround myself with,” she says.
The team found a way to completely change the process. The result? Cost savings between $2 million and $2.5 million. But you have to look for these broken processes or you’ll never find those kinds of savings.
“Ask questions,” she says. “They need to challenge their department managers on why we do things the way we do things. I started asking questions — ‘Well, why do we have this program, and why is it costing this kind of money? How can we do it cheaper? How can we do it with less people?’”
And don’t stop after you resolve one problem. After that fix, Massey started looking for other inefficiencies, as well.
“When you’re trying to increase margins and create additional efficiencies in the business like these times require, it challenges management to step back and look at things that you haven’t looked at because times were good, such as overhead, processes, systems, the way we approach our customers, several things like that,” Massey says. “We’ve centered around those things and said, ‘How do we want to do this different now?’”
