15 de April 2025
How to measure efficiency
The three paths that the most successful companies follow to measure their processes, systems and organizational culture from the point of view of efficiency.
One of the great challenges that companies face today and whose trend is increasing is the lack of efficiency to measure key indicators that allow them to achieve business objectives.
The past is measured much more than the future, the quantitative more than the qualitative and the business goal (effectiveness) more than the process to achieve it (efficiency).
When companies don't meet their business goals, they often have a hard time explaining why. Here arises the need to measure processes to determine their efficiency.
It is key to understand the explicit or implicit interactions between collaborators such as emails or chats sent, times spent correcting incomplete data, creation of intermediate spreadsheets, reprocessing due to data quality problems, lack of training or use of unofficial cloud software contracted by end users.
These activities are often overlooked but are crucial to optimizing daily work.
According to a Gartner survey, in 2022 41% of employees solve their tasks with tools that are outside IT supervision, a figure that could reach 75% in 2027.
When we face this problem we can go down different paths:
-Try to govern and automate processes: avoid by all means that interactions exist outside formal systems. That is, every interaction is recorded in our official transactional systems.
-Reactively measure all events and estimate as best as possible what their real flow is like.
In my experience the first approach is the most frequent when promoting projects. They are very ambitious approaches that normally require significant investments and in most cases do not have the expected success.
If we decide to go for this option, we will face numerous technological, process and cultural challenges. It is normal for us to design rigid processes that do not consider exceptions, that are not flexible enough and that do not adapt to the business. The ending is a classic: users do not adopt the process and inevitably continue managing through email, chats, spreadsheets and other informal channels.
There is another option that is a new trend related to process mining, which allows us to obtain the necessary "insight" without generating such important reengineering of our systems and organizational culture.
They are not magic solutions, in many cases they have important limitations and the viability of their implementation must be analyzed, but we certainly recommend putting it on the evaluation table.
We can also think about hybrid solutions that have different components, that take the best practices of each approach. Today with the incursion of AI, we have new tools that allow us to think about novel approaches.
Before implementing any technological project, we recommend conducting a comprehensive analysis of the problem that considers the organization, processes, culture and available technology. Thus, we can find the best solution that minimizes the effort and maximizes the probability of adoption and success of our initiatives.
