Process Improvement

The road to having an effective and efficient company

“Working with RCC has been amazing! Rita’s knowledge and experience really shows through in every consultation we’ve had together. I found it refreshing to have RCC take the time to pick apart the way that we handled our hiring processes to fine tune, correct, and improve them in all aspects. She provided us a new blueprint for hiring and evaluating employee performance. Rita helped us to implement a new system that is faster, more efficient, and scalable.”
“Rita really takes the time to understand your business and provides valuable insights. The only thing that could have worked better is if I had known Rita earlier in my business; I would have done more sessions with her to fine tune other areas of my company. The next time I scale up and need business process improvement, I would not hesitate to contract RCC’s services. I had an excellent experience and would gladly work with them again!”
—J.L., West Boylston, MA

The Business Challenges that Process Improvement Solves

There could be one or a multitude of reasons why you are interested in Process Improvement. Any one of these business challenges is a reason why small business owners like you hire Rita Coco Consulting to help them capture and enhance their operations to increase effectiveness (employees doing the right things the right way) and efficiency (employees doing the right things within allotted timeframes).

Any of these challenges click with you?

• Your employees are great, yet they are not as effective as they should be.
• Jobs are not getting done on time and within budget.
• There are service delivery issues.
• Employees perform the same job differently and with different results.
• Mistakes are eating into profits.
• It is time to reduce customer complaints.
• No matter how much training the employees receive, there is still inefficiency.
• You have processes but people are not following them.
• Your sales cycle is too long.
• Your closure (hit) rate is too low.
• You experience more turn-over than you would like.
• You want to increase quality but do not know how to standardize.
• Employees need to be more independent.
• Your supervisors and managers complain often about employee mistakes.

These are all symptoms of process failures.
Even if you check only one – call us! Click to call NOW!

Are You Really Interested in Buying Process Improvement? Well – no!

You are interested in saving time and money, maintaining quality so that you can make more money and increase profits. Some business owners (maybe you?) want to do all of this and work less hours especially in the daily operations of your business. This is your return on investment in buying a Process Improvement service; here is brief description of what you would buy to receive that ROI.

Process improvement is a systematic approach to
capture, examine, streamline, eliminate or enhance the way a small company performs business functions,
especially how they deliver their services and create their products.

You have these types of processes (because you have these business functional areas):

• Sales
• Marketing
• Service Delivery
• Operational
• Financial
• Human Resources
• Management
• Risk avoidance
• Database and information
• Legal
• Research and Development
• Technology

Of course, you can’t examine them all at one time, nor should you! We advise you to start within the business function area where your performance gaps are occurring. Look at the challenges you checked on our list above. Where do you need to start? What do you know you can do to improve your processes; where and on what do you need help?

Why Choose Rita Coco Consulting to Increase Effectiveness and Efficiency

In the 1990’s, Rita Coco Consulting was actively involved in re-engineering organizations. We ‘wall-papered’ many large corporation conference rooms with process flows so that Fortune 500 companies could go paperless and take advantage of the technological revolution.

We worked within many different industries to improve many different processes: accounting, selling, marketing, manufacturing, product development, document tracking, front and back office operations, high tech engineering, consulting, and service delivery. We taught many complex computer systems to new computer users who often had less than 90 days to adopt the new processes and transition effectively into their new semi-automatic environment. If we could do this successfully for corporations, by the end of 1999, we were ready to introduce process improvement to small business owners. First, these small business owners had to understand that process improvement was their inroad to increased profits!

In 2000, we introduced process capture to small business owners who complained of ineffectiveness and inefficiency. At RCC, we believe that EVERYTHING a company does is part of a process that MUST be documented if the company wants to achieve continuous growth. Growth without major setbacks is not easy to do. Customer complaints are red flags indicating that a process is broken. Not meeting deadlines, going over budget, not having the right personnel are indicators of processes that need to be fixed. But a business owner cannot fix a process that is in someone’s head; it has to be captured before it can be examined or enhanced.

In Summary

The organization isn’t just a collection of people.
It is also a collection of processes.
And many of these processes have never been deliberately managed.
They just sort of developed over the years.
Nobody ever took responsibility for designing them.
And nobody’s making sure they perform as they should…
Lots of people have their fingerprints on [them] but no single individual is accountable for overall process results.
—Price Pritchett, Managing Sideways

If your processes are efficient, flexible, and effective, so is your business. Most businesses, however, are made up of a complex web of redundant and inefficient practices, including uncertain or unclear policies, entrenched and outmoded procedures, and obsolete business rules. Successful small business owners understand that there is value in looking at the details of how their businesses operate. They know they should understand the processes by which their company does what it does. But most owners don’t know HOW to study their own business, because they’ve never been exposed to the tools and methods used to do a systematic examination. Using tools like work flows, process flows and other recognized methods can help you understand the good things your company does and the places where your good intentions are stifled by bottlenecks and obsolete practices.