One of the major bothers of administrators in the private sector is how to keep costs within a minimal margin. At a management conference recently I discovered that most of the people who attended were worried about keeping operational costs down to the barest minimum. Two bankers asked this question at the conference and we spent a lot of time doing a hypothetical cost benefit analysis on resource management particularly in the banking environment, where most of the participants came from. A cost benefit analysis according to experts is often described as ), "a systematic approach to estimating the
strengths and weaknesses of alternatives (for example in transactions,
activities, functional business requirements); it is used to determine
options that provide the best approach to achieve benefits ..".
We dived right into the areas that attract most of the costs in office operations beyond salaries which is a necessary expense that we cannot readily do away with.
Research has shown that the areas where costs are on the high in the work environment include energy consumption: diesel, petrol and gas; stationery usages: A4 paper( as well as other sizes) toner for our printers; Data Consumption for internet access and of course the time spent in traffic for people who work in the field.
A typical office worker who is into document production uses upwards of 10,000 sheets of paper a year, a lot of it is waste since not all goes into producing the final documents that are filed.
Efficiency expert, McCorry says "Paper management costs vary from one company to another, depending on
how each company is configured and which costs that particular company
associates with paper. Companies that are considering paperless systems
need to know not only the costs associated with implementation of such
systems, but also the current costs of managing data in paper format. So the question is how does your organization handle paper? Have you put in a recycle policy into your work environment to ensure that paper is managed properly? The other side of this is to put as much as possible on our computers so as to ensure that we have soft copies in lieu of hard. We need to infuse computer networking into our briefings and network meetings, using paper only when its absolutely necessary.
A December 2016 energy report states that Nigeria uses 12 million litres of diesel daily. How much of this does your office consume on a daily basis? What can you cut down on? At the conference we realized after serious analysis that there are ways in which a company that serves members of the public regularly can do without a nine hour consumption of diesel on a daily basis. Apart form the long drawn advise of finding alternative means of powering our offices we have to simply cut the hours in which we we run those powerful generators and see what measures can be put in place to power the offices when the external customers are not necessarily around the premises. Glassy rooms are more difficult to cool via air conditioning than halls with fewer windows. The fewer the people inside an office, the less air conditioning we need. Refrigerators, air conditioners desk top computers and water dispensers can all be switched off when they are not in use. Laptops are known to consume less power than desktops, lights should only be ignited when absolutely necessary. In a small office where most of the activity is field based we can afford to shut down all the power until its absolutely necessary for the lights to be on.
One area that really shocked me is the use of armed police as protection. Some banking institutions pay as much as N40,000 a week to get the police to man their premises. My answer to that was simple. Large organizations that have enough outlets should register their own security organizations and get permits for their guards to carry weapons.
Micheal Hammer's theory of re engineering looks at business from a more efficient perspective. Re engineering is "... the fundamental
rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve
dramatic improvements in critical contemporary modern measures of
performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed."The emphasis here is on costs without necessarily losing quality and speed.
In the areas of data usage, many of our younger operators are wont to spend hours online for non profitable ventures. While we like to furnish our offices with unheeded access to the internet, we need to hold our operatives accountable for the data they use. Activity outside of the office needs to be timed. Its not all the time that we have traffic on the roads therefore there are periods when holds ups and hiccups can be avoided. Vehicular movement therefore has to be studied to enable us move unhindered in our outside travels. The operational analysis adopted by experts in a cost benefit analysis hinges on a couple of considerations. They include: What options are available? With cheaper options would my performance level be affected? Would options affect the comfort of those that run the business? Would I still be able to meet my obligations to the customer and my staff? With all these taken into consideration there is no reason why we cannot become more cost effective at what we do.
