Collinson Grant

Managing complexity

What we do

Markets are complex, and changing rapidly. So how can managers hope to impose effective controls on the business and its processes? Complexity does not have to result in confusion. Thorough analysis can find its root causes. Armed with this understanding, and with a mastery of the specific business targets, managers can apply all the resources of the business to increasing the profitability of customers, channels and products. The priorities are:

Remove – unwanted product lines, unnecessary services, and redundant processes
Simplify – products and services, focus on the customer’s needs, hone skills
Integrate – expensive resources more efficiently, design modular systems and common processes
Innovate – recognise when complexity provides a competitive advantage. Manage production and the whole supply chain aggressively to contain costs.

How we do it

Our approach is:

to take a top-down view of a company’s complexity and decide whether it is justified from the customer’s perspective
to create a strategic framework that allows managers to focus on and navigate around complexity
o concentrate efforts for achieving higher returns by using pricing for competitive advantage, creating superior standards of customer service, and optimising costs and efficiencies.

Our experience

Over time there is a tendency for all systems, markets, business processes and relationships to become over-complicated and cluttered. The result is inefficiency, the allocation of resources to non-productive tasks, unnecessary costs and lower profits. Our work – in all sorts of organisations - centres on helping managers to concentrate on resolving specific problems that yield tangible, bottom-line benefits to the business.