We present an overview of the comprehensive Business Toolkit developed by Partner Africa in collaboration with The Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, ABInBev and AIM-Progress. This toolkit equips businesses with strategies to build sustainable and resilient operations by improving crucial areas that directly impact their success. Read more to see how to achieve business process improvement.
Key Areas for Business Process Improvement
The toolkit covers several key areas essential for business growth and sustainability:
- Productivity and Efficiency
- Quality
- Health and Safety
- Time Management and Productivity
- Worker Cooperation and Communication
- Workforce Management
- Environment
- Business Integrity
- Land Rights
By addressing these areas, businesses can enhance their operating efficiency, ensure ethical practices, and drive long-term growth. In the following sections, we’ll explore how each of these crucial areas impacts the bottom line and provide a summary of the key recommendations from the toolkit. The toolkit can easily be accessed here.
How These Issues Impact the Bottom Line
A compelling case can be made for why businesses should focus on these key areas. These areas are linked and have a significant impact on a company’s profitability and resilience. Consider these examples we highlight in our toolkit:
- Costs of employee turnover can range from 30-150% of the worker’s annual salary. Turnover costs include lost productivity, recruitment, onboarding and training costs. High turnover creates instability and prevents building an experienced, skilled workforce.
- Every $1 invested in health and safety yields up to $6 in benefits through reduced absenteeism, turnover, injury costs and increased productivity. Creating a safe work environment is one of the most profitable investments a business can make.
- Effective communication practices can reduce likelihood of employee turnover by over 50%. Open communication builds trust, surfaces problems early, and enables workers to contribute solutions that improve productivity.
Ignoring these issues can be extremely costly, while proactively managing them provides a very high return on investment. For more detailed information and statistics on how each area impacts business performance, refer to pages 8-9 of the full toolkit document.
With these potential impacts in mind, let’s explore each key area covered in the toolkit.
Strategies to Improve Business Processes
1. Productivity and Efficiency
Why it’s important: Improving productivity and efficiency is essential for a company to stay competitive, be sustainable and grow. The toolkit outlines a process for improving productivity and efficiency:
- Review: Use checklists to assess current capabilities and identify areas for improvement. Checklists allow businesses to systematically analyse their processes to find weaknesses and opportunities.
- Analyse: Prioritize issues to tackle and understand root causes. Use techniques like the Pareto principle to identify the 20% of issues causing 80% of losses, and root cause analysis to find the underlying drivers.
- Improve: Develop action plans and implement solutions, with a focus on worker involvement. Engage the workforce to brainstorm and implement practical improvements to processes, equipment and working practices.
For a comprehensive guide on improving productivity and efficiency, please refer to pages 8-33 of the toolkit.
2. Quality
Why it’s important: Quality issues can result in major costs from wasted materials and labour of reworking products, lost customer trust, and even lost customers. The toolkit recommends:
- Empowering workers to identify and solve quality issues. Provide training and implement systems for workers to spot defects early, halt production if needed, and suggest corrections and improvements.
- Strengthening quality control and assurance procedures. Implement in-line and final inspections and standardize procedures to ensure conformance to specifications.
- Cultivating a culture of teamwork and continuous improvement. Quality is everyone’s job, not just the quality department. Encourage a mindset of surfacing problems without fear and systematically making things better.
To delve deeper into quality management strategies, please consult pages 34-47 of the toolkit.
3. Health & Safety
Why it’s important: Poor health and safety leads to high costs from accidents, lost productivity, worker absenteeism and turnover, and potential lawsuits. Key recommendations include:
- Ensuring a safe physical work environment with proper protective equipment. Provide well-maintained facilities and protective gear at no cost to workers.
- Training workers and managers on health and safety procedures. Make sure everyone understands the risks and safety procedures for their role. Don’t assume people will just pick it up.
- Establishing a health and safety committee to identify and resolve issues. A formal committee with participation from workers and managers improves communication and accountability around identifying and addressing hazards.
For detailed insights and practical advice on implementing robust health and safety practices, please see pages 48-55 of the toolkit.
4. Time Management and Productivity
Why it’s important: Excessive overtime is costly in terms of increased payroll, reduced productivity and quality, and increased accidents and ill health. Reducing excessive overtime requires commitment, clear policies, and addressing root causes of overtime such as:
- Production flow and planning issues. Analyse the production process to identify and resolve bottlenecks. Use techniques like line balancing to improve flow.
- Bottlenecks and wasted time. Map the production process to target areas where time is wasted on waiting, delays, motion, overproduction, or rework. Implement the 5S system to reduce wasted time.
- Quality issues requiring rework. Strengthen in-line quality control to catch defects early before significant rework is needed. Analyse root causes of defects.
- Lack of worker skills. Provide training to improve efficiency. Balance workloads and ensure skill levels match tasks. Consider skill-based pay systems to motivate quality and productivity.
To explore effective time management techniques and productivity enhancement strategies, please review pages 56-65 of the toolkit.
5. Worker Cooperation and Communication
Why it’s important: Open communication and good worker-management relations drive productivity and quality improvements by leveraging workers’ knowledge to solve problems and motivating workers. The toolkit covers:
- Establishing effective grievance procedures. Provide confidential channels for workers to raise concerns without fear of retaliation, and ensure fair, transparent processes to investigate and resolve issues.
- Respecting freedom of association. Allow workers to organize and bargain collectively if they choose, in accordance with legal requirements. If unions are present, build constructive relationships and negotiate in good faith.
- Engaging workers to identify and solve problems. Establish communication channels to solicit workers’ input for continual improvement. Consider implementing a formal suggestion system and offering bonuses for ideas that are implemented.
For in-depth guidance on fostering better workplace communication and cooperation, please examine pages 66-77 of the toolkit.
6. Workforce Management
Why it’s important: Poor workforce management practices like low pay, child labour, discrimination and temporary work are not only unethical but lead to an unstable, unproductive workforce with high turnover. Basic good practices in areas like wage payment, avoiding child labour, preventing discrimination and harassment, and providing regular employment are essential for an ethical and productive workplace.
- Pay at least the legal minimum wage, on time, with required benefits. Establish clear, transparent pay practices and inform workers of their pay and deductions.
- Have robust age verification procedures to avoid child labour. If child labour is discovered, act in the best interests of the child. Offer apprenticeships for youth to gain skills.
- Treat all workers equally regardless of gender, race, religion, etc. Make hiring, promotion and pay decisions based solely on qualifications and performance. Have clear policies and training to prevent harassment.
- Provide regular employment without excessive use of temporary contracts. Temporary arrangements may be needed for seasonal work but avoid using them to evade legal obligations. Give temporary workers equal pay and benefits.
To gain a thorough understanding of various aspects of workforce management, including wages, child labour prevention, and anti-discrimination practices, please study pages 78-95 of the toolkit.
7. Environment
Why it’s important: Ignoring environmental issues can lead to major costs from cleanup, lawsuits, and reputation damage. Environmental responsibility and resource efficiency provide cost savings and mitigate business risks. Key areas to measure and manage include:
- Energy use. Analyse energy consumption, maintain equipment, and install energy efficient lighting and motors. Set reduction targets.
- Water use. Assess risks to water supply and opportunities to reduce usage. Implement water saving equipment. Set targets and support community water stewardship efforts.
- Waste and recycling. Conduct a waste audit. Implement recycling systems. Measure and seek to reduce waste. Consider appointing a team to champion waste reduction.
For strategies on environmental management and its importance to business process improvement, please consult pages 96-99 of the toolkit.
8. Business Integrity
Why it’s important: Corruption and lack of business integrity pose major legal and reputational risks that can threaten the viability and social acceptance of the business. The toolkit recommends:
- Understanding relevant regulations. Be aware of all anti-bribery/corruption and integrity related laws and standards that apply to your business.
- Establishing policies and reporting/whistleblowing procedures. Have a clear code of conduct on ethical behaviour. Provide confidential channels to report violations without retaliation.
- Training employees on how to respond to integrity issues. Ensure employees know how to handle requests for bribes, gifts or favours and how to report them. Managers need to lead by example.
To learn more about maintaining business integrity and preventing corruption, please refer to pages 100-103 of the toolkit.
9. Land Rights
Why it’s important: Acquiring land without following proper processes and respecting rights of communities leads to major legal, financial and reputational risks for the business. When acquiring land, it is crucial to ensure:
- Legal land rights processes are followed. Conduct thorough due diligence to ensure sellers have legal title and no land conflicts exist. Follow all legal processes for land transfer.
- Rights of local communities are respected. Engage local communities to understand their formal and informal land use practices and rights. Avoid deals that would harm local livelihoods.
- Disputes are avoided through Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Consult affected communities, provide full information, and obtain consent before proceeding with projects. Establish grievance mechanisms to resolve disputes.
Land Rights For crucial information on respecting and managing land rights, please review pages 104-107 of the toolkit.
Conclusion: Driving Continuous Process and Improvement
In summary, this valuable toolkit provides suppliers with practical guidance and tools across the full range of business functions to drive productivity and growth while ensuring good working conditions and ethical practices. Improving in these areas is crucial for a business to be viable, stay out of legal trouble, retain workers and customers, and gain efficiencies. We highly recommend reviewing the full document and implementing its systematic approach to continuous improvement.
By focusing on these key areas of business process improvement, you can significantly enhance your operating efficiency, drive sustainable growth, and build a resilient business. Remember, process improvement is an ongoing journey. Regularly review and refine your strategies to stay competitive in today’s dynamic business environment.
Partner Africa, in collaboration with our many partners, has developed a collection of similar resources that can be accessed on our free resources page.
Partner Africa offers Advisory Services capable of supporting businesses with human rights due diligence and responsible sourcing processes. Contact us for a consultation on your business practices.
