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)
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.
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.
Foundational free Patterns
Buffer external information and subscribe to updates
Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities
Automate for environmental impact
Implement automation in a sustainable way
Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to
Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics
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