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Keeping overhead costs to a bare minimum is one of the greatest challenges of every business. Just imagine what a 10% reduction of sales, finance and HR - not to mention manufacturing - costs would do to your margins. But how can this be achieved?
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Cutting labour or purchasing costs can negatively affect quality, motivation and important supplier relationships. A more constructive and lasting approach is to re-engineer your working processes through Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the aim of which is to streamline information flows and/or to modernise them with a workflow approach.
Streamlining the administrative processes
Here are 2 business cases from ESOPE's experience :
- An insurance broker for several months risked losing control over its accounts receivable, in spite of a large staff and temporary employees. For reasons of insurance law, the company was divided into 2 legal entities, which were both involved in all customer contracts. Customer premiums had to go through the 2 entities with a complex retrocession scheme. After taking into account legal and fiscal constraints, ESOPE proposed another approach. The recommendation was implemented, leading to a reduction of 40% in the number of journal entries with equivalent turnover. Debt collection improved dramatically and the company's financial credibility was restored.
- A large pharmaceutical company organized seminars for its various business units. Participating departments increasingly raised doubts over the costs that were charged to them for these events, and the organizers did not have a sufficient grip on overall costs for this activity. After analysing the seminar organisation scheme, ESOPE proposed to clearly separate actual cost control from an internal recharging scheme based on quotes. This re-organisation solved the problems while diminishing the workload, reducing deadlines, and enabling better management control - all this without any new IT solution.
Dematerialising and securing administrative procedures
Some examples :
- Expense sheet management is a heavy process in many companies. Dematerialisation means inputting the expenses in specific spreadsheets, using individual payment cards for which operators transmit transaction files. It can further include such things as using digital signatures and seamless integration into the accounting system. Nonetheless, expense sheets must be stored for control purposes.
- In the food retail sector, dematerialising key suppliers' invoices through EDI allows centralisation in one purchasing centre and the recharge of the per-product cost to the points of sales. As a result, administrative processes are simpler and faster.
- In the tendering process, techniques such as certified electronic signatures, encryption and time-stamping now allow the transfer of documents at drastically lower cost than express courier services while benefiting from confidentiality and identification levels that surpass registered mail.
- Electronic signatures can generate significant efficiency gains. For instance, the Tax authority authorise "teleVAT" to declare and pay VAT on the internet (now compulsory in France for companies over 15 million euros turnover).
Dematerialising administrative procedures can bring significant financial gains: lower costs, shorter deadlines and generally increased efficiency can be achieved at very high levels of security due to recent advanced in electronic signature technology and law..
Changing your administrative procedures requires pragmatic yet expert assistance. ESOPE's consultants are skilled in all relevant business and related fields.
"Making things complex is easy, making them easy is more complex".
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Enhance productivity
