Deciding to make an investment in your business and implementing that investment is only half the battle. Once you have made the expenditure, it is critical that the environment of people, processes and technology in which the investment operates has been optimised to enable the best returns. Too often, we see benefits failing to be realised to their full potential. Example causes for this problem include:

• Poor handover from the Project team to the Business As Usual team means your team struggles to use the investment effectively
• Resistance to change or lack of buy-in from the Business As Usual team means your team is not inspired to use the investment effectively
• Legacy business processes have not been updated to maximise benefit from the investment (This Is How We’ve Always Done It)
• Integration of the new investment with existing systems proves insufficiently robust and your team resorts to inefficient workarounds or legacy processes
• Provisions for increased infrastructure requirements have not been put in place, causing your investment to be ineffective, unreliable or entirely incapacitated
• Benefits are not actively monitored to enable effective course-correction.

In addition, it is not unusual for there to be some ambiguity on how or when the return on an investment should be measured.

Avaelis can help you with these issues by implementing proven strategies that enable you to maximise the return on your investments. We offer the following services:

• Our Investment Management service carefully monitors the benefits realised by your investment and mitigates or eliminates both anticipated and unanticipated roadblocks to optimise effective use of your investment.
• Avaelis’ Investment Return service helps you to maximise the return on your investment by employing proven change management and benefits realisation management strategies.
• With the Application and Infrastructure Improvement service, Avaelis reviews and optimises your application and infrastructure architecture to identify and eliminate ROI inhibitors.
• The Business Process Re-engineering service uses Lean techniques to optimise your business processes, taking into account your current systems and removing tasks that do not add value to gain maximum value from your investment.

When you engage Avaelis in the area of Leveraging ROI, you can expect:

• Improved ROI through the preparation of the people, process and technology environment in which your investment will operate and monitoring benefits to keep your returns on track
• Clarity on how and when to best measure your ROI to facilitate organisational learning and continuous improvement to help you further improve the quality of your investment decisions

A recent McKinsey study indicated that the average knowledge worker spends less than forty percent of his or her time actually performing role-specific tasks. More than three full days per week are dedicated to reading and answering e-mail, searching and gathering information and communicating and collaborating internally. (3)

Knowledge workers often spend much of their time:

• Traveling to and participating in a multitude of ineffective meetings
• Navigating tools and technology solutions that are not fit for purpose, simply outdated, or which they do not understand sufficiently to use effectively
• Making best-effort decisions with an incomplete understanding of the tasks that take place before or after theirs
• Relying on time-consuming and error-prone manual labour for administrative tasks and as a result spending even more time error-checking and duplicating work
• Scouring the Internet, intranet and internal reporting systems and questioning other staff for information before combining it all into regular custom reports, such as weekly sales reports.

These are examples of everyday challenges faced by workers in your organisation. And then there is the question of what to do with conflicting information in different reports. What if hardware failure causes the loss of countless hours of hard work? How do you make sure that your staff continues to be productive when they are away from the office? And how should you handle your staff using online social networks?

To unlock business productivity in your organisation, Avaelis offers the following services:Our End User Productivity service focuses on the many opportunities to make your workers more productive. Tailored competeies Avaelis can develop include collaboration, mobility, KPI management, people development and workflow analysis.

• Avaelis’ Automation service identifies potential areas for the reduction or elimination of expensive manual labour tasks by putting in place streamlined, automated processes.
• Our Enterprise Intelligence service provides you the opportunity to significantly cut down time spent by your staff gathering information and can deliver valuable, timely insights that would otherwise be too difficult to attain.
• With the Supply Chain Optimisation service, Avaelis will increase the efficiency, reliability and agility of your supply chain, for example through the implementation of flexible IT systems and channels, standardising business processes and elimination of duplicate effort.

When engaging Avaelis in the area of Business Productivity, you can expect:

• Reduced cost through automation of time-consuming tasks, elimination of task duplication and a more efficient workforce
• Reduced error rates and associated cost and customer dissatisfaction by reducing reliance on error-prone manual tasks and by optimising your supply chain
• Improved staff productivity through enhanced, tailored collaboration and mobility strategies
• Improved staff engagement by enabling your staff to focus on the interesting tasks that really matter and reducing tedious administrative work
• Additional insights to help you make better informed strategic decisions and ensure your organisation’s competitiveness in the market.

References 

1. Bloch, Michael, Blumberg, Sven and Laartz, Jürgen. Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value. s.l. : McKinsey & Co, 2012.

2. Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander. Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think. September 2011.

3. McKinsey Global Institute. The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. s.l. : McKinsey & Company, 2012.