Roadmap Leading to a Step Change in Profitability Improvement

In today’s volatile market, it is crucial for companies to fine-tune their organizations and processes toward increased profitability and productivity, to have a strategy for continuous improvement, and to institute a means for graduated measurement. In putting together a continuous improvement strategy, a roadmap is essential. The roadmap must be clear and easy to follow. The roadmap that is most easily understood and accepted by an organization is one that is started from a base case, or simplified visualization of the current environment, that is called the ‘As-Is’ case, to the target environment, the ‘To-Be’ case. This roadmap clearly depicts the route to be taken and is based on business process modeling, scoring of actual practices relative to best practice, and gap analysis. A series of activities and process improvements are identified to move towards the desired ‘To-Be’ state of business processes, supporting information technology, and improved methods to measure and review performance. A well-designed roadmap will move the organization in a series of step changes toward higher profitability and productivity.