10 Ways to Save Money In Your Organisation

Editor's note: this transcript was generated by AI and has been lightly edited for clarity and relevance — some sections have been shortened or removed, and minor transcription errors corrected.

Full transcript

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How do you stop wasting money in business? All too often, the response is to cut back on activities seen as wasteful, without really understanding the impact. We've identified 10 steps to really stop wasting money.

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One: really understand how your business works. Inefficiency can creep in in so many ways — inconsistent working, inaccurate working, duplication, redundant outputs. The only way to identify these is to really understand what is done in your business. The best way is to adopt a business management approach and map out your processes, measure their effectiveness, and make changes where necessary.

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Two: focus on the outputs. A process transforms inputs into outputs, and it's the outputs that really count. This is very quickly picked up when actually doing the process mapping. Keep asking: what is produced?

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Three: ask the person who does the job. More than anyone, they'll know where the inefficiencies are, and they're likely to have good ideas about what should change.

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Four: look at the handover points. This is often where the most waste arises — one department produces something not quite in the format the receiving department needs, so it needs reworking.

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Five: look for the bottlenecks. If something is waiting at a pinch point, it's not delivering any value during that time.

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Six: involve the person who owns the process. The process owner has the authority to change the process, so involve them and they can work with you to make changes right there and then.

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Seven: implement best practice. Very often the same process is delivered differently in different parts of the business — once captured, the most efficient version can be identified and adopted throughout.

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Eight: capture key data at the process level. Using a QMS which allows you to capture and report on key data allows less obvious inefficiencies to be identified and addressed, and lets you quantify how much money has been saved.

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Nine: model potential improvements. Once you have a process model of your organisation, your QMS should allow you to model different scenarios for improvement, so you understand the impacts before they're made.

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Ten: continually look for ways to be more efficient. Identifying inefficiencies should not be a one-off exercise, but a continual one.