How Is Hidden Factory Impacting Your Natural Gas Business?
While businesses within the Natural Gas industry represent a small subset of the global economy, the experience and intellect that exists within our industry never ceases to amaze me. Recently, we have been working with a firm whose business lead called out “hidden factory” as a major cause for concern, identified as a leading inhibitor to business performance. In fact, hidden factory exists in all companies to one degree or another.
According to the Six Sigma Institute:
The Hidden Factory is the set of activities in the process that result in reduction of quality or efficiency of a business process or manufacturing department and is not known to managers or others seeking to improve the process.
For natural gas businesses, this tends to equate to inefficient data entry and data exchange, excessive data reconciliation, recurring calculations and report generation that are impacting top and bottom-line performance, customer service quality, and staff job satisfaction, leading to retention issues. Across the many natural gas industry interactions we have had, the common root causes of hidden factory include:
- business data strewn across too many spreadsheets or systems,
- excessive manual tasks that are tedious, prone to human error, and demanding increasing headcount to manage, and
- operational system issues – lack of functionality and/or poor response time.
Sound familiar? If so, WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT!?
The Natural Gas industry is comprised of a sizeable number of LDCs, Marketers, Pipelines, Producers, and Utilities. And the vast majority are suffering from the negative effects of hidden factory, yet few are targeting hidden factory for remediation. “It is what it is”, said one COO who long ago gave up on trying to convince her CEO that revenue and profit growth will require increasing headcount investment unless a substantially lesser investment is made in productivity and efficiency improvements. When I queried what is getting in the way, the response provided was, “We had a bad software experience and have lost faith in our ability to find and derive decent ROI from another investment, so, instead we are throwing headcount at it, which, as you know, has its own set of problems and is driving our costs higher.”
For those of you who have been following this approach and have reached your headcount investment limit or for those of you seeking to avoid headcount expansion and its inevitable outcome, give us a call and let us introduce you to a better option, nGenue, and the potential it represents for your natural gas business – you have nothing to lose by exploring nGenue, plenty to lose by not doing so. Isn’t it time to take a stand to eliminate the hidden factory within your Natural Gas business?
End Users, LDCs, Marketers, Pipelines, Producers, and Utilities face increasing competitive and compliance pressures, requiring increased operational efficiency, data integrity and process improvement. Their operational systems must support this, but most don’t. Engage us and we’ll show you how to make a breakthrough. It’s what we do for natural gas companies, and we are experts in our field.
nGenue enables Natural Gas Operational Excellence!
~ Ken
