ExpertActions has helped hundreds of clients to improve execution and meet the needs of customers better by applying business process redesign. Typically, our work generates cost savings of the addressable cost base, but its real advantages are reduced cycle times and increased quality and customer satisfaction.

• Business process redesign examines the efficiency and effectiveness of a company's most critical processes. It is a key enabler to deliver the highest-quality of service, in the most productive way, at the most competitive cost and time to output.
• ExpertActions works with each client to prioritize key processes based on the value at stake. For each priority process we develop a view of the current state based on operational data, using detailed process maps and analysis to help identify major gaps. We then work together with a cross-functional client team to define a series of principles that will guide the solution generation phase, and create a vision of the future state of each process from the ground up, along with the roadmap to achieve the near and long term results.
• We work very closely with our clients in this type of project, enlisting a team from all the functional areas impacted at the leadership and the solution generation level. This allows us to eliminate waste, unnecessary wait times, reports, handovers and sign-offs, while ensuring the integrity of the process.
• Performing firms have performing functions that help enable their broader business strategy and objectives. In ExpertActions’s experience, optimizing within each function creates improvement but is rarely enough to reach full potential. The biggest gains come from looking within and across functions and fundamentally changing the way people work together to deliver the value corporate support.

To create lasting improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, we help firms focus on getting four things right:

• The appropriate role and aspirations for support functions: leaders need to anticipate and adapt to evolving industry and functional trends. Functions are evolving their roles to focus more on enhancing business value as opposed to delivering transactional support.
• The service portfolio and service levels aligned with business needs: performing companies build alignment with the business on which support services should be competitive and which services should be ok to help meet business needs and manage demand.
• The optimal service delivery model: Corporate fundamentally change how work is done in order to simplify and eliminate some activities. These structural changes require a greater commitment than quick cuts to the current system but provide much lasting value.
• The right people, processes, and systems: Optimizing those functions is not a one-time event. Ensuring the right people are in the right jobs with the right priorities and the right incentives ensures that costs don’t creep back in. Organization that get it right offer the re-training necessary for employees to succeed in their newly designed roles, invest in tools that drive productivity and create a culture of continuous improvement to ensure that processes keep getting better and costs don’t creep back in.

ExpertActions has ratea differentiated approach to corpotate optimization:

• We focus on effectiveness and efficiency versus just cutting costs. Instead of starting with what functions are doing, we start with what customers want.
• We tackle both the function-specific improvement opportunities and the deeper structural issues. These often cut across functions and involve organization, processes, systems and culture.
• We don’t streamline processes. We change how the work is done. We offer customized solutions using multiple levers and tools to create larger and faster results that are sustained over time.

At the heart of any improvement is recognizing that support functions may need new roles for new aspirations. The greater a aspiration, the deeper the structural changes required. We work with business leaders to redefine the work, and to help employees find fresh ways of adding value to the broader organization.

In the past few years, in part driven by the economic downturn, companies cut G&A costs aggressively—18% on average, reports a recent ExpertActions survey of support function heads and operating executives in organizations yet these results are not translating into higher satisfaction among the business leaders. Some business executives in our survey still rate their support functions as high cost, ineffective, or both. Most alarmingly, only one in four companies is able to sustain these savings after years. Support functions seem to be working harder to run in place.