The COVID-19 pandemic bought with it many challenges for businesses. For COSOL, we have used the opportunity to find new ways to maintain and enhance connection and collaboration with our clients.
One new initiative is introducing an online collaboration ‘whiteboard’ tool as part of our business process improvement methodology. Virtual or remote process mapping has enabled us to continue working closely with our clients despite the disconnect between distributed teams and remote working.
Recently we’ve been working with a cross-functional team distributed throughout Australia to review the complete business processes for MaxiTRANS. Creating a collaborative and interactive virtual workspace with all relevant participants involved means we haven’t lost the opportunity to gather vital information in the very first instance. Working together, we’re supporting MaxiTRANS to capture and understand the aspects of their business that work well and identify those parts of the process that could be improved.
“We’ve found that introducing virtual whiteboarding has enhanced our process,” said COSOL Business Improvement Consultant Matt Boulden.
“Where previously we might have had a limited number of participants able to us join for meetings, we now have an open forum where team members can revisit the initial work and continue to contribute beyond the first meeting – not to mention the more introverted members of the team are now more inclined to get involved,” he said.
MaxiTRANS provides a range of innovative solutions and services for the road transportation sector. Well-known within the industry, MaxiTRANS has a reputation for being a leader in supporting the entire value chain and life cycle of road, bulk and refrigerated transportation.
Greg L’Estrange, MaxiTRANS Executive Chairman, said he’d been pleasantly surprised and impressed by the effectiveness of the virtual workshops.
“Thanks to the COSOL-led remote process mapping workshops, we were able to bring together a large group of people across multiple sites to contribute to our business improvement program. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken at least four months to bring together this group to get the outcomes we achieved in three weeks.”
We’re so pleased that MaxiTRANS has trusted us to partner with them in their business improvement journey and that they’ve been open to finding new ways to tackle the old issue of collaboration.