Scenario and goals
Antica Ditta M. S.p.A., a market leader in gold production, had undergone significant growth, the source of operational inefficiencies perceived by Management. Despite the "normality" of the fact that company growth phases are always accompanied by inertia both at the level of the organization and at the level of processes, Management wanted to address these issues according to a gradual, pragmatic approach focused on specific problems, identified within specific functional areas.
Within this context, the Commercial Function had been identified as the first area of intervention, also with the aim of constituting a "test bed" to allow us to assess the adequacy of our working methodologies and skills to Management's expectations.
Process steps
As a result of the prior analysis carried out in the brief with senior management, two process steps were identified through which corrective actions could be developed:
- Fact-finding survey of the operations of the Commercial Function.
- Processing and Formalization of Results and Operational Suggestions
Actions
1. They were carried out:
- interviews with "operatives" of the Function in question, in order to gain a sufficiently in-depth knowledge supported by detailed documentation of the Function's operations;
- interviews with the head of Information Systems in order to acquire information, both technical and functional, about the Information System in use at the time;
- interviews with management, in order to acquire more "high-level" information to supplement what has been gathered through the activities in the previous points;
Information was also acquired about the volumes of activity and the main costs allocable to the Commercial Function in order to obtain a reasonable quantification of the related "complexity costs."
2. The information acquired was processed, producing a summary report that made it possible to highlight the critical issues encountered and identify corrective actions, which thus became an integral part of an action plan for optimizing the Commercial Function's operational flows.
Results
The work carried out made it possible to make substantial changes in the allocation of activities of individual resources, and to achieve a major adjustment of the internal information system. Better exploitation of existing functionality was also a key prerequisite to the definition of the business policy changes that gave rise to the company's new successes.