Simple Tools Enable Customers to Help Businesses Reduce Costs

Recently I took my daughter to eat at one of our favorite restaurants, where I always admire the fantastically engineered process the management has designed for recovery of materials when people are done with their meals. The restaurant specializes in soups served in ceramic bowls and sandwiches balanced on glass plates, yet uses the basic fast-food set-up where customers stand in line to order and retrieve their food.

Unlike most fast-food chains where customers wad up their packaging and shove it in the nearest trash receptacle when done, at this restaurant, a series of recovery stations serve as process tools to enable customers to sort paper waste, dishes, silverware and trays. The configuration brilliantly enlists the customers in separating disposable waste from reusable items.

What an ingenious operational support strategy! The restaurant reduces its own operational costs by encouraging customers to essentially bus their own tables and sort their utensils. The resource time saved is measurable. Additional business resources otherwise required to perform the separation of trash from non-waste are not needed, reducing the risk of falling short on some other level of service.

Ultimately, the customers’ adherence to the process is what makes it successful. The restaurant’s philosophy is to keep the process simple and provide the most effective tools, and then define a performer. In this process of waste and dish separation, the tool was the recovery station, and the performer was me—the customer.

The same idea holds true for internal business support processes. The people who perform the various tasks take ownership in business processes, and that is what makes a business successful. Organizations that have consistent and high adherence to process compliance have processes that are easy to understand, easy to perform and provide quantifiable business value.

Reduced costs, improved support, managed risk, and environmental compliance all begin with simple tools that involve everyone in the process.