Monique Hughes

Over the past two months, I have been part of a national process redesign project. The seconded team from Deloitte consists of five people from Consulting and two from Assurance & Advisory working in a team of approximately 25 people.

They call it the ‘Impossible Project’ – a process design project already in the implementation phase which radically changes a large business in a matter of months.

The federal government has decided to pull all states under a single piece of legislation to reduce inconsistency. The legislation will completely change the way that distributors, retailers and customers interact. As a result, the client faces changes across all its customer-related processes, and we are helping them design and implement these changes.

The business itself is a complicated one, and ‘customer-related processes’ is certainly not as clear as it seems. Customers, consumers, the premise, and the occupants of a premise can all mean different things and the same thing at one time. The person who pays for the service may not necessarily be the person within the premises who utilises this service. As such, defining who the customer is and how we deal with them can be a significant challenge.

As consultants on large projects like this, we rarely get to see the fruits of our labour from design to completion. But when the legislation is in effect, we will have helped a business become compliant and move into the future, and I am really enjoying being a part of that.