However, owning a building would come with some significant costs, such as needing to engage a property management company, additional insurance costs, etc. You’d have also more flexibility in terms of making changes to the building. It can also provide additional income via leasing out any space you are not using. There are many things to consider in this situation: owning space offers you an opportunity to grow your business, for example, if you need to add another floor, you already own it. Decide on lease vs own model: While it makes sense to lease space for your Operations, in some cases it makes more sense to own your space, for example, if there is a good supply of cheap real estate while rents are high.leasing an additional floor due to an increase in staff) represents an opportunity to further decrease real estate costs.

Renegotiate real estate leases: Using the opportunity to renegotiate a lease when it is about to expire or when there is a considerable change in your Operations (e.g.

Please note that a move of this capacity can be a complex undertaking – its costs and disruptions should be taken into consideration.

Relocating to a cheaper location: Relocating your Operations to a less expensive location can be a great way to further reduce Operations costs.

Having a local ops office that immediately digitizes incoming mail and distributes it can eliminate 1-2 days of mail transfer from the East Coast to the West Coast (such as from Vancouver to Toronto or from Los Angeles to New York and Boston) Specifically, where it can provide for savings at the resource level, local language skills or speedier processing times.

Spread your physical footprint (hub vs satellites): In contrast to the last point, sometimes it is beneficial to have multiple locations.

In many cases, eliminating a local office and consolidating its activities into a nearby Operations centre can provide meaningful savings.

Consolidate your physical footprint: Each of your company’s real estate locations (whether leased or owned) drives additional costs.

Operational Efficiency and Footprint & Real Estate Furthermore, it can provide important insights into intra-day and mid-/long-term work volumes and required capacity.

Leverage analytics: Strong analytical capacity will allow you to slice and dice your operational data, identifying opportunities to make Operations more efficient - such as workforce planning.

Some geographies offer price points that are several times lower than, for example, the price point in North America.

Off-shore: Off-shoring some activities can drive even stronger price arbitration than outsourcing.

Reasons for this include a lower price point, faster service delivery, and/or special skills that an outsourcing company can offer.

Consider Outsourcing: In some cases, it is more cost-efficient to hire a third party to perform certain activities.

Making process changes - including the adjustment of a company’s physical footprint, outsourcing or offshoring of particular processes, changes to organizational structure - can help increase efficiency.

Rework operating model: If your Operations or Back-office is used to always doing things in a certain way, it does not mean that there is not a more efficient way to do those things.

Driving change: If the status-quo is not a solution, a change management program driven by change agents (whether they are internal, or external) can energize an entire organization, highlight new ways to do things, and motivate people on the journey to increased efficiency.

Lean defines various types of waste such as unnecessary inventory, unnecessary transportation, excessive rework, unnecessary work etc.

Embrace Lean: Lean methodology strongly focuses on operational efficiency and the elimination of waste throughout an entire process, whatever that process may be.

The main idea is a constant improvement of processes, driving new efficiencies using numerous process improvement methods and tools.

Focus on Continuous Process Improvement: Continuous process improvement is similar to Lean Six Sigma, however, it lacks the formality of an LSS program.Originally born in manufacturing, this program has since been adopted by companies across various industries. Introduce a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) program: LSS focuses on efficiency improvement through the reduction of variation in processes and output and elimination of waste.A Shared Services setup ensures that the entire organization, including Operations, uses available resources in a pooled and highly efficient way. Introduce Shared Services: An operating model that leverages Shared Services is often more efficient than the model where each business area has its own, often redundant functions.General Operational Efficiency Improvements

Efficiency in operation