Essential Strategies for Eliminating Waste Across the Enterprise

Make haste, not waste. It sounds so simple.

However, especially in the largest, most complex enterprises, boosting speed and weeding out waste is proving stubbornly difficult to accomplish.

Waste can stem from a number of problems, such as overproduction, redundant projects, ineffective resource utilization, poor risk management, and a range of other issues. There can be many reasons, but ultimately, the upshot is that money, time, and effort get expended that fail to yield adequate, if any, return.

To eliminate waste, it takes more than simply iteratively improving existing processes and cost cutting measures. Instead, enterprise leaders must take a more holistic approach that ensures that they have greater transparency and visibility into everything that is happening.

Harness VSM and ValueOps to eliminate waste

Today, Value Stream Management (VSM) represents a best practice for mitigating waste across large organizations. This methodology is designed to provide an organization-wide approach to managing value streams, based on an understanding that value flows across multiple business areas, functions, and teams.

VSM represents a significant shift from the more traditional project-based approach. VSM provides organizations with greater transparency and visibility into how value is delivered to customers and it allows for work to be tied directly to that value flow.

ValueOps by Broadcom is a platform that helps teams capitalize on the advantages of VSM approaches. ValueOps provides a holistic view of the entire organization and all its value streams. Risk identification, assessment, prioritization, management, and escalation become an integral part of the overall understanding of status.

Four ways ValueOps can help

By leveraging VSM approaches and ValueOps by Broadcom, teams can aggregate work and roll it up to provide a comprehensive view of value streams. With ValueOps, teams can establish an optimal approach that maximizes value creation while minimizing waste. The sections below offer an overview of some of the key elements of this approach.

1. Integrated work management and automation

Using an enterprise VSM platform like ValueOps, teams can streamline the synchronization of data from all business areas and teams within each value stream. This reduces the amount of manual effort required, freeing those individuals up to focus on the delivery of value, while reducing the chances of human error and inconsistency.

2. Synchronization of business priorities and work

With ValueOps, teams can synchronize business priorities and the work carried out to deliver on those priorities. This enables teams to ensure all individuals understand when they need to pivot in response to shifting operating conditions—and why. This empowers teams to make the appropriate adjustments effectively and efficiently, eliminating considerable waste. The platform also helps everyone understand how their individual and team efforts contribute to strategic performance, so they can more easily make decisions that support value delivery.

3. Optimized resource allocation

ValueOps equips teams with advanced resource management capabilities, so they can optimize resource allocation. Tying work directly to the flow of value makes it easier to define a stable roadmap of upcoming investment initiatives. That in turn means that resource capacity planning can be more accurate and reliable, therefore improving utilization rates and allocations while minimizing delays and bottlenecks. Organizations benefit from improved productivity, while employees feel more engaged because their work is more predictable and over- and under-allocation is avoided.

4. Greater transparency and visibility

With VSM and ValueOps, teams can establish streamlined communication channels based on a shared understanding of priorities and initiatives. This is supplemented by the platform’s powerful real-time reporting and dashboards. These views enable stakeholders and decision-makers to quickly identify and address any potential waste before it has an impact on performance. This further ensures that all efforts are focused on work that delivers real value for customers, and by extension, the organization.

ValueOps in action: Boeing eliminates millions of dollars in duplicate work

Boeing’s internal IT team, which featured 6,500 staff members, was tasked with reducing the budget by 30 percent in just a few years. This meant that they had to focus on delivering the best possible value for every work effort, with no compromises in quality. To accomplish this, the team zeroed in on eliminating all forms of waste. Efforts ranged from optimizing initial resource assignments to ensuring that adjustments and pivots could be made easily, without disruption, and with minimal overhead.

To support their transition, the team at Boeing adopted VSM approaches and they selected ValueOps by Broadcom. Fueled by ValueOps, the team shifted to a value stream-based approach and a centralized intake process. This helped Boeing to not only prioritize their work more effectively, but also to improve resource utilization and allocations.

The benefits were immediate and significant. In months, before many of the improved processes were in place, Boeing was able to eliminate $25 million worth of overlapping and duplicate work. This freed up resources to work on higher value initiatives, and reduced the risks associated with that inappropriate activity. At the same time, all resources became more focused on outcomes over outputs, improving the way that they managed their own activities to better align to value and further eliminate wastage.

Over the next three years, this solution would go on to save Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars. Boeing has been able to focus not just on current work, but increasingly on the innovations that will deliver capabilities that will allow them to thrive in the future. That they have been able to do that while significantly reducing budgets is testament to the power of VSM and of the ValueOps platform.

Conclusion

Today’s organizations must constantly operate with optimal effectiveness and efficiency. When time, effort, or money are wasted, it hurts the bottom line—and the damage doesn’t stop there. Competitive positioning, employee motivation, and many other areas can be compromised. ValueOps by Broadcom offers the advanced features that help teams identify and root out waste. To learn more, be sure to download our detailed white paper, Eliminate Organizational Waste.