have your business processes become inefficient?
Discover how to get them lean and agile
entropy is not your friend
Entropy is a measure of disorder and in any closed system, such as your organisation, it has a natural and unavoidable tendency to increase. It’s the reason why your business processes don’t spontaneously improve by themselves, why daily problems rarely resolve themselves and why your coffee gets cold whilst you’re busy working. All require energy to be expended, for improvements to be made, problems to be resolved and your coffee to be kept hot.
Your process performance metrics may not always tell the full story and whilst outcomes might look acceptable, under the surface there may be variation, delays, rework and waste which are not being captured.
Making your processes more efficient can:
Decrease costs
Decrease lead times
Increased productivity
Increased customer satisfaction
a reality check
In many organisations how works gets done often evolves according to immediate need, with little time and resources being available to stand back and look at how efficient their processes are and if they are still fit for purpose. If you are not sure, some important questions to ask yourself are:
Why are we doing it this way?
Is it the best way to do it?
What data do we have to answer those questions?
Typically, the answers to those questions are along the lines of "We've always done it this way", "Not sure, but it seems to work most of the time" and "We do collect some data but it doesn't really tell us what we need to know". If this sounds familiar, then read on.
A better way
If you approach one of the large auditing companies to go through your organisation and discover what needs to be changed, they will no doubt be very thorough, create impressive presentations and charge you a substantial fee. You may well be left with recommendations that you don't fully understand, or are unable to implement and that may well get filed away in a server somewhere for distant, future use.
Whereas perhaps what you really needed was for someone to help you make simple, positive changes and improvements which you can maintain over time. It's often not that hard.
There is no magic involved, in fact many of the tools that you need were designed over fifty years ago, and they have been refined and adopted by some of the most successful organisations.
some scenarios
Typical process related scenarios within an organisation might be …
You realise that there are process inefficiencies in your organisation, but are not sure where to tackle first, so you would like to analyse the overall current state to define priorities.
You have already identified one or more suspect processes that need to be improved, but are not sure how to best go about it.
You need to design one or more new processes to support a new product, service, system, supplier or internal change.
Or, you may just need some documentation because …
You're going through an internal re-organisation and need to get a baseline of your current processes before any changes are made.
You need to achieve a particular certification or accreditation and realise that some of your current processes are not appropriately documented.
the fundamentals
All of the above can essentially be reduced to four areas. I realise that not everyone lives and breathes process, which is probably just as well, so I've assembled a brief summary of what's typically involved for each, together with some “real world” examples to illustrate the steps required. Just click on the links below to discover more.
The techniques illustrated here are completely scalable and can be adapted to any size of organisation and any size of problem.