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Reduce touchpoints

Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties

Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)

Description

The exchange of information with a client or third party is always time-consuming. Especially when information exchanges take place by regular mail, substantial wait times may be involved. Each contact also introduces the possibility of intruding an error. Hammer and Champy (1993) describes a case where the multitude of bills, invoices, and receipts creates a heavy reconciliation burden.

Note that this heuristic is related to the Interfacing heuristic in the sense that they both try to improve on the collaboration with other parties.

Performance considerations

Reducing the number of contacts may therefore decrease throughput time and boost quality. Note that it is not always necessary to skip certain information exchanges, but that it is possible to combine them with limited extra cost. A disadvantage of a smaller number of contacts might be the loss of essential information, which is a quality issue. Combining contacts may result in the delivery or receipt of too much data, which involves cost.

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Foundational free Patterns

Assign cases

Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases

Distinguish case types

Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes

Isolate exceptions

Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow

Minimize numerical involvement

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Specialist-generalist

Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources

Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

Role-based task assignment

Assign tasks based on resources' roles in the organisation

Teamwork-based assignment

Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity

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Connected to

Establish standardized interfaces

Consider a standardized interface with customers and partners

Minimize numerical involvement

Too many cooks spoil the broth

First-contact problem resolution

Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues

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