by R. Srinivasan

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.
Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker is right, of course. Time has immense practical value. Time is money. But do we really understand what time is? We only sense its passing, based on the regular daily rounds of the sun, phases of the moon, devices known as clocks … et cetera. Some people relate time to karma, others relate time to entropy – while others still blame Einstein for all the confusion. After all, if everything in the universe is in ceaseless relative motion, whom can we trust?

When we harken back to our childhood, this inevitable question pops up in the mind: ‘O Father Time! What have you done to me?’ But perhaps that plaint should be addressed to Father Karma? Or to Father God? Is time just another name for God?

Indeed, we have no choice but to be humble. So let us turn to practical matters, related to our livelihoods. We do so by delving into Srini’s first-hand account of his many years of professional experience in the efficient management of time.

---

Most of us are not conscious of time until we are faced with a deadline. Soon enough, we do reach the deadline, miss it, and regret missing it without anything tangible to show for it. This happens because we are not conscious of the fact that, unlike all other resources, time is an irreversible resource. Once it is spent, we cannot ever get it back.

In its early days, management thinking focused on time from the point of view of resource usage directly contributing to goods or services. Consequently, there was the development of ‘time and motion studies’ involving labour and machines. The subject of Industrial Engineering was an early recognition of time as an important dimension, when productivity was measured in terms of output per unit of time.

However, as business organizations grew bigger and bigger, the importance of time was replaced by other esoteric subjects which became fashionable. Most of these esoteric subjects were concerned with the use of behavioural science concepts to enhance productivity. Somewhere along the way, the correct understanding of time as an important resource was lost. But Information Technology and the onslaught of Japanese management concepts, as also Goldratt’s theory of constraints, brought the focus back on time – and especially so when globalization of economies after the 1990s started affecting businesses all around the world.

My own experience working with organizations on change and growth management gave me a ring-side of view of how a focus on time can lead to dramatic performance improvements. I will share these perspectives here, with some first-hand examples which bring out different aspects of time as an irreversible resource.

The two examples I cite here illustrate a simple equation: The throughput of a process is the inverse of processing time. For example, reducing the processing time by half will double the process throughput. This became one of my key guiding principles – my mantra – in business process reengineering.

My earliest case was when we were working with a corporate hospital to implement business process reengineering in 1993. The management of the hospital was keen to adopt this concept in 1993, when Hammer and Champy’s book Reengineering the Corporation hit the stands, and it became fashionable for everyone to climb on board. Our first engagement was supposed to be a proof of concept of the idea for the hospital; accordingly, they asked us to help implement the same at one of their off-site diagnostic centres.

We started working with a cross-functional team. They reported that the actual value addition time for most of the routine diagnostic tests was between 3 and 20 minutes. However, due to other procedures as were then required to be followed, they could not deliver test reports in less than 8 hours.

We challenged the team to come up with a reengineered process, using the basic concepts we taught them, to deliver the report in 30 minutes for these routine tests. Surprisingly, when they did a rethink, they could simplify and reengineer their 20-step process to 4-step reengineered process and deliver the report in less than 30 minutes! Of course the implementation took some time, in making suitable IT modifications, setting up some mechanization in sample handling, and a re-layout of the centre. But another outcome of this project was that it put pressure on competing labs in the neighbourhood to match this centre in faster reporting. A new standard for delivering diagnostic reports was thereby set.

---

The next example is an engineering company in power electronics which used to get orders for supplying custom-built equipment for large engineering projects. Over the previous seven years of its existence, the company had found that, although on paper they had a gross margin of 60%, they used to lose money on every order executed. The management asked me to take another look at the particular business unit and recommend changes to make it profitable.

When we sat with their cross-functional team, we analyzed a sample of 100 orders over the previous seven years, and looked at the time taken for each milestone from inquiry to final payment collection. Two interesting observations were made by the team. The inquiry handling group in marketing was dealing with close to 1500 inquiries a year, and they had to get inputs from all the departments concerned before making a final offer against an inquiry. Always being under deadline pressure, they made assumptions about the specs, and made the offer knowing well that not more than 10% of the quotations would lead to an order. But when an order did land up in the hands of the execution group, they found errors in the technical and commercial specs as accepted by the marketing group. They had to go back to the customer for amendments, thereby losing time even before order execution could start. Thus, even after quoting a delivery time of 16-20 weeks, they could not deliver any order in less than 32 weeks. They ended up losing money in liquidated damages et cetera.

When we sat with the team for redesigning the process, we challenged them to come up with a process by which they would deliver an order in four weeks. This looked impossible to them, until a Pareto chart showed them that 80% of the inquiries were similar, and required only a few of the fifteen standard designs which the group already had. Thus they not only saved on the time to quote, but also improved the accuracy of quotations. Inaccuracies, the root cause of all delays and losses, were almost eliminated, and the redesigned process helped them to execute orders in less than four weeks.

The most interesting revelation was that they found they had higher production capacity than they thought they had, without any additional physical resources. They also had the capability to respond to export enquiries, which was earlier thought to be impossible due to the long delivery times they had to quote.

About a year later, I met the marketing head at an airport. He told me that the manufacturing people were pressing him to get more orders, since BPR helped them deliver faster than the rate at which marketing could provide new orders.

---

I have many more examples of focusing on time across different industries and services, where the focus on time as a measurable goal to deliver value to customer had dramatic performance improvements. Each case had a learning experience unique to that business; without exception, each was a very useful lesson. In each case, we found that the focus on time as an irreversible resource was a powerful approach to make dramatic changes in business process and get equally dramatic performance improvements.

Our favourite quote was: ‘God created only day and night, but man created the week, the month and the year’. So we must focus on this day and this night, and what we do with it – rather than the week, the month or the year. In other words, the key leading indicator of financial performance is, quite simply, how well time is utilized from day to day.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson