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Give Details Top Billing 209

step in the procurement process had been documented, more than 100
square feet of a wall in the project-planning center were covered with index
cards. Needless to say, the process was hopelessly complex and very often
redundant so that capital materials procurement was taking as much as a
year and a half, with seven or eight months of that eaten up by the internal
bureaucracy.
Astonished company executives could only wonder how it had happened
that pieces of paper were going back and forth for months on end, and for
absolutely no reason at all. Once the process was streamlined, the savings in
time and money was considerable.
When we work with a team on a strategic initiative, a willingness to
become immersed in details is a must. At Mead Johnson, for example, the
exhaustive process began with the creation of a complaint analysis team to
determine the path traveled by product complaints, either from an individual
or from another company. It took us three to four months to complete the
flow chart documenting each step involved. The team interviewed every
department along the route, and when the flow chart was done, each depart-
ment was asked to check it for accuracy.
Simultaneously, the team followed one sample complaint through the
entire handling process and clocked the amount of time each step took.
Multiplying the time factor by the department’s charge-out rate allowed the
team to assess costs. The team discovered that a single complaint traveling
through the analysis system took an average of 30 days and cost the company
up to $910 from beginning to end. Having established its data, the team was
then able to draw up a new flow chart for an ideal system.
One change drastically reduced the number of complaints that were
still being stored after the process was completed. Before the analysis, all
complaints were being held for four months, even though most of them
were never looked at again. The team logically determined that only those
complaints that posed a potential legal threat—packaging that had allegedly
been tampered with—or those that involved a federal, state, or local govern-
ment agency needed to be retained. This one simple change of process saved
the company considerable time.
Not all of the team’s proposals and recommendations could be instituted
immediately because some depended on decisions in other divisions. But
initial forecasts pointed to eventual savings of $123 per complaint. Dr. Cross
said, “The teams have saved in dollars thus far tens of thousands which have
already [produced] a payback.”