Before you venture outside your organization to search for best practices, look in your own backyard. You may find that one of your departments is saving 50% on a particular process because they developed a faster way to get the job done. How valuable would that knowledge be to other departments and divisions?
Develop a system for identifying, communicating and implementing best practices you uncover within other parts of the company, using the following tips as your guide…
1) Form a cross-functional team to promote the enterprise-wide creation and communication of best practices.
2) Develop an employee rotation system, which enables employees to become "carriers." For instance, an employee who started in accounts payable might spend six months there, then six months at another department and so on. Each time your employees rotate, they take with them the ideas they've learned at the previous department.
3) Create a central database for best practice ideas and display them, such as via an intranet, to all employees, via e-mail or intranet.
4) Encourage managers to report in on a regular basis about what processes and management techniques they use, so you can share the best of those techniques with your other business units. Use best practice information to determine what you should handle centrally – such as treasury, cash management and internal auditing, and what functions could be handled in a more decentralized manner.
5) Reward employees for any ideas that are put into practice, through a bonus, or promotion, or perhaps even a percentage of the profits if the idea becomes a revenue generator for the company. Implement a system designed to promote idea sharing, and to foster communication across business units.
6) Start within your shared services area. Shared services has become a hub for best practice ideas, because people within those centers are well positioned to see how a number of different business units are doing things.
7) Focus only on internal best practices that support strategic goals. Putting the company's strategies on the intranet and telling people they'll be paid for coming up with ideas to support those strategies isn't enough.
At most companies, diamonds in the rough remain unidentified simply because methods for extracting and communicating these potential best practices don't exist. In today's business environment, which is attuned to capitalizing on every opportunity and eliminating waste, there's no excuse for neglect.
