Book provides tips on how to revolutionise business operations

A new book by business and digital technology experts Tony Saldanha and Filippo Passerini provides a living model for constant, ongoing process evolution and optimisation and shows how one can deliver a dynamic business process transformation.
    Companies win in the marketplace by doing two things - creating winning products, and creating winning operations that get the product to the customer. The focus of the book "Revolutionizing Business Operations: How to Build Dynamic Processes for Enduring Competitive Advantage" is creating winning operations that get the product to the customer.
    The Dynamic Process Transformation model gets to the root causes of the recurring obsolescence of business processes, the authors say.
    First, even the best business process design can become stale if it doesn't constantly compare itself with the most disruptive new ideas across companies, and more importantly across industries.
    Second, functional business processes tend to be optimized within their silos. And finally, unless there is a disciplined methodology to drive this constant reoptimisation to every person in the operation, it leads to episodic business transformation.
    Among the issues the book addresses is that of the limited shelf-life of most business transformations. It says that business processes within a company must play by certain rules called drivers to design sustained, dynamic business transformation.
    First, every business process must be driven by "open market rules". Secondly, the main killer of business process performance is organisational silos. So business process performance has to be de-siloed. The final driver called "dynamic operating engine" addresses the core issue of the obsolescence of business processes, by designing superior structures and methods of operations.
    The book, published by Penguin imprint Berrett-Koehler, has three case studies to describe the three drivers of dynamic business process transformation - open market rules, unified accountability, and dynamic operating engine.
    The authors also say many adaptable companies have a common thread of certain factors, which result in dynamic business processes. These three drivers are based on the research of the expanding gap between leaders and laggards during crises.
    The authors say the book is aimed at business leaders, public sector officials, and nonprofit managers.
    "For simplicity in communications, it is addressed primarily to companies, but the concepts it contains also apply to public sector and nonprofit groups. The size of your organisation and your level within it is immaterial. There are clear patterns to how business operations can go beyond simple improvement and be transformed to become your secret weapon for winning consistently," they write.
    According to the authors, the issue with the business processes of every company - product development, production, manufacturing, sales, finance, information systems, human resources, and so on - is that they quickly get obsolete due to ongoing changes in the marketplaces, technology, workplaces, and many other factors.
    "These business processes grow more complex, rigid, and siloed over time. Unfortunately, current approaches to updating and improving these business processes fail because they are usually one-time changes via transformation projects. That doesn't fully annihilate company silos or create ongoing, self-improving, transformation," the book says.