As businesses grow they become more complex. They do so due to the increasing number of people, products, services, clients, regulations and equipment. Not resolving complexity is expensive – costing money in re-work, high staff turnover, quality failures and damage to brand.

According to Wilson and Perumal (Waging War on Complexity Costs, 2009) 15 to 30% of all operating expenses are typically due its unnecessary complexity. And, whilst complexity costs ‘creep’ in incrementally, you can remove them in ‘chunks’.

The question is: How to simplify complexity?

In our experience, businesses struggle to overcome operational complexity when they think of operations in terms of structure rather than process. Structure includes organisational teams, departments, equipment, buildings, machinery etc.

All work in a business is undertaken through process – that’s how businesses get things done – as a cooperative system of people and technology working together. Therefore, to improve and simplify the business, we need to think about process before thinking about structure. This creates the freedom to re-organise and re-engineer how work is done; leading to improvement options that could otherwise not be seen in light of the business’s existing structure.

By using process management techniques, business owners and managers can start to remove chunks of unnecessary complexity and transfer a significant portion of what was once operating expense to their bottom line.