Start by identifying your needs:

•  Each year has its own priorities, identify them. Make a list of the essential projects and goals that your department has for next year, which must always be aligned with the company’s objective and strategy.
• Establish a clear differentiation between what is due and expected. Here, it is important to be clear about the priorities of the department.

Assess how to deal with them:

• Identify best practices inside and outside the company in order to learn and adopt them.
• Implement synergies between company departments so that you use internal knowledge and experience to replace contracting third parties.
• Find new ways of doing things. This will allow you to identify possible efficiencies within the processes you are in charge of.
• Establish a relationship between the expense and the main indicators of the department in order to establish a correlation between them and optimize the cost.

Economically value the needs of your department:

• Identify, along with your team, the financial needs required to carry out each of the proposed plans.
• In this stage, it is important to plan in terms of quantities and prices so that both variables can be controlled. In this way, you can ensure that a budget is built based on operational metrics and a level of detail is guaranteed in which execution can be monitored.
• Determine which of the assets you are in charge of really generates value and which ones do not. Try to cut off the latter.
• Normalize spending around the size of the business. The company does not always require 100% use of the installed capacity. Align the cost of your department with your capacity utilization.

Prioritize initiatives:

• Prioritize initiatives from each department in relation to the return, time, and effort it will take to implement them.
• Be aware and tune into the moment of company. You have to be willing to give up history, inertia, budget that at some point you needed, but no longer do, so that vicious cycles that perpetuate an inefficient allocation of resources are broken.

Some premises you should consider:

• Please note that you should not budget for technical or corporate training expenses as these are budgeted centrally in CECOS and specific accounts, and are under the responsibility of the People and Transformation Vice Presidency.
• Learn more about the generalities and accounts for ZBB and non-ZBB budgeting here.