Part 1
How to Uncover Low-Hanging Fruit
Seeing the Problem Is Harder than Solving the Problem
When faced with low-hanging fruit, a short ladder is all you need! We have had the privilege of helping many Fortune 1000 companies in a range of industries solve literally thousands of problems in a matter of months. These companies have announced to Wall Street that their solutions would yield tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in new earnings. These companies then delivered even more than they announced.
To say the least, these results are uncommon! Most companies generate far lower rates of improvements. Having watched literally thousands of managers generate over 100,000 good solutions, we can bust one myth about innovationâit does not require uncommon courage and uncommon creativity. In Part 1, we describe many tactics that will help you and your teams find new insights about how to improve your company and strengthen your problem-solving skills.
You may think that seeing problems worth solving is the easy part. Well, it can be, but it can also require some new perspective. For example, imagine a call center team that has invested a lot of time, money, and energy in improving how they handle customer complaints and problems. They have become so good at it that customers who call with a problem stay loyal customers. Sounds good, right? They have seen and solved lots of problems.
The call center team members see the poor handling of dissatisfied customers as the problem to be solved. They see things from their own perspective, which is, âWhat can I do when an unhappy customer calls?â
But thatâs the wrong problem. The right problem to solve should be to prevent problems that generate calls. A customer problem that is prevented is a lot better than a customer problem handled, even when handled well.
In this part, you will find many ways to uncover low-hanging fruit that is currently obscured from view.
Problem Solving in a Nutshell
We pack a lot of air in our luggage for a very simple reason: We literally just do not see it. Remember, we said that if your luggage were filled with red sand rather than air, you would get right on solving that problem? Solving problems starts with acknowledging those problems.
If you truly believe that invisible problems surround you, you are far more likely to find ways to see them. If you do not believe it, you will not see it.
Try seeing the problem in this situation: Banks need to send some overdraft notices by snail mail. There is no clever way around mailing the notice. A highly efficient bank operations group uses the least expensive paper and envelopes they can buy, the most efficient printing process, the lowest-cost postage, and the smallest mailing list required by law.
Do you see the problem they should try to solve?
Continue reading when you are ready.
Sending paper notices is necessary but using envelopes is not! The problem is that the company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on envelopes to send required notices.
The envelope solution is a quick illustration of good problem solving. We start with the money and see that we are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on envelopes. We then use this information to see a problem that is normally overlookedânamely, that we are buying and mailing envelopes that we would rather not buy and mail if we could find a way to avoid it. We call this a problem even if we have no idea how to solve it.
We then ask why we send envelopes. The obvious answer is because overdraft letters contain confidential information that only an envelope can keep private.
This answer seems reasonable, but before we give up we ask, âHow do we know thatâs true?â To confirm that our answer is true, we bring in a new perspective by talking to vendors who sell paper, envelopes, and mailing services. Lo and behold, a few conversations later we discover that there is a vendor that has designed a gluing operation to fold and glue a postcard so the information cannot be seen until the postcard is unsealed.
Aha, a practical solution to a problem we had not even acknowledged. The vendor informs us that its postcard process was specifically designed to eliminate envelope costs and to reduce the overall costs for mailing private information.
This saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars!
Chapter 1
Put a Price Tag on Everything to Stop the Waste
Problem solving must start by following the money. The problem the bank faced was not âWe are wasting envelopes.â The problem was âWe are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on envelopes.â
Following the money helps to turn an accepted practice into an unacceptable problem. Just imagine if everything your company did had a price tag. We mean, literally, a price tag, stamped on every section of every report telling you how much it cost to produce that section. Imagine a price tag on every record of every transaction telling you how much that specific transaction cost to complete.
Assuming motivated managers, this new visible information would change the tune from âThatâs how we do things hereâ to âWow, why does it cost so much?â or âHoly cow, this is not worth it!â
Putting a mental price tag on everything helps to place the focus on solving problems that matter. Two companies distribute marketing materials using a list of contact information that is only 85 percent correct. That means that 15 percent of the material distributed does not go to a real prospect.
Do both of these companies have a problem that they should try to solve? You need to follow the money to decide. The first company distributes material using e-mail. Sending material to people who are not really prospects has a very low incremental cost. The second company mails printed brochures that cost millions of dollars.
By following the money, we know that the first company does not have a problem worth solving, while the second one does.
Generally these price tags are metaphoricalâa list on a spreadsheet. One technology industry executive was having a hard time getting anyoneâs attention, so he went out and bought a package of labels. He then disassembled the product down to the last screw and attached a price tag to each part with the fully loaded cost of delivering that part to the customer. At the next meeting of the task force, with representatives from Engineering, Research and Development, Factory Operations, Brand Marketing, Sales, Logistics, and Finance, the executive laid out all of the parts with their price tags on a large conference table.
The reaction? Stunned silence. No one had realized how many different parts were used in just the one device. They certainly did not have a clue about how much some of the parts cost that were not important to the customer experience.
An executive who was frustrated by the countless reports produced by his company decided to commandeer a large conference room, which he filled with every report the company routinely produced. The stacks upon stacks of reports were visually arresting. Then he had the finance team put Post-it notes displaying the price of every report.
With serious money lurking in all of those reports, he then opened visiting hours for the executive team!
Talk about packing air versus sand in the suitcase!
Within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved by eliminating, simplifying, or automating many of those reports.