If It Ain’t Broke, Fix It Anyway

Author: Larry Chester

Last month I ended with a question. Once you’ve set realistic objectives for your business, what has to change in how you run it to actually hit them? A process, a system, a role? Maybe all three!

This month I want to answer that with a philosophy I’ve held for a long time. You’ve heard the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I’ve always believed the opposite. If it ain’t broke, go ahead and fix it anyway.

That doesn’t mean tinkering for the sake of tinkering. It means nothing in your business should be exempt from a hard look, especially the things that seem to be working just fine.

“We’ve Always Done It This Way”

Every business has processes that have been done the same way for ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty years. Nobody questions them because they work, more or less. The invoices go out. The orders get filled. The month gets closed. But they were designed for a different company, with different people, different customers, and technology that may not even exist anymore.

When most owners look at a process like that, they try to improve it. Shave a step here, add a check there. That’s fine, but it keeps you inside the original design. You end up with a slightly better version of something that was built for yesterday.

What I’m talking about is something more dramatic. Review the process, then don’t stop at remodeling it. Reconceive it. Recreate it.

Start With a Blank Sheet

Here’s the exercise. Pick a process and pretend you know nothing about it. You don’t know how it’s done today. You don’t know what works and what doesn’t. You don’t know who does what. All you know is the raw information you’re starting with, and the end result the company needs.

Now ask: if we were building this from scratch, today, what would the ideal version look like?

Look at it from every angle.

• What tools exist now that didn’t when this process was designed? What should the system be doing automatically that a person is doing by hand?
• Who should be doing this work, and what should they be spending their time on? The best process puts people where judgment matters and takes them out of the rote work that wears them down.
• Where do errors creep in today? Every time information is re-keyed, copied, or passed from one person to another, there’s a chance to get it wrong.
• Are there cross-checks to verify accuracy? Who reviews what, and does the review actually catch anything, or is it just a signature? What is the error rate?

Then sit down and list everything that could go wrong. Not just the problems you’ve had, but the ones you could have. The goal is to design a process where 95% of those failures can’t happen in the first place, instead of one that relies on catching them after the fact.

What It Looks Like

Years ago, I was walking through a client’s front office one day and heard a steady beep-boop, beep-boop, beep-boop.  I had heard it every Monday and Tuesday since they hired us as their CFO.  My curiosity finally got the best of me.  I decided to track down the sound.  As I walked around the office, I finally got to the cubicle that was the source.  There was a clerk sitting there with three piles of paper.  She scanned the first piece, scanned the second piece, then stapled them together and put them on a third pile.  I watched her for a moment and then stopped her.  “What are you doing?”  I asked.  She said that she was matching the pick ticket to the sales order, so that the warehouse workers had everything they needed to pick the order.

I was stunned.  They had a person who spent up to two days a week matching paperwork so that they could pick an order.  They had been doing this for years.  I grabbed a pick ticket and the matching sales order and went to IT.  It took them less than two hours to write a program that created the pick ticket, and sent the pick ticket, a copy of the sales order and the packing slip to a printer.  The warehouse worker picked up those three sheets of paper, picked the order, put it on a skid.  Done deal.  Two days of weekly unproductive clerical time was eliminated by two hours of computer programming.

That’s not an improvement to the old process. It’s a different process. And it’s all automatic.  There are no mismatched docs on orders.

Why Owners Don’t Do This

Mostly because it’s uncomfortable. The current way is familiar, everyone knows their part, and there’s always something more urgent. Rethinking a process from the ground up takes time and usually costs something up front.

But the cost of not doing it is quieter and bigger. It’s the hours lost to work that shouldn’t exist, the errors you keep fixing, and the growth you can’t handle because your processes were built for a smaller company.

The Takeaway

Pick one process this quarter, ideally one your strategic plan depends on. Get the people who do it in a room, along with someone who has never touched it. Set aside everything you know about how it’s done today and design it fresh, looking at technology, people, accuracy, and controls.

You may find the old way holds up better than you thought. More often, you’ll find a better way that nobody saw because nobody was looking.

If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway.