Maximize Business Performance with Effective Process Enhancement
Benchmarking for Superior Product Development
Benchmarking involves designing, developing, and producing highly complex products with higher quality, faster, and at a lower cost.
Building a Successful Organization
A successful organization delivers quality products at reasonable prices and ensures customer satisfaction.
Understanding Today’s Customers
Today’s customers view the provider as a whole entity. They expect every interaction to be a pleasure. This can only be achieved when every interaction is coordinated with a strong focus on the processes controlling these interactions.
Process vs. Organization
It’s crucial to shift the focus from blaming employees to analyzing the process. Employees should understand their role within the overall process. Evaluation should be process-oriented rather than individually focused.
Process-Oriented Organizational Change
Organizational change requires:
- A belief that change is important
- A vision that describes the desired future state
- Full organizational support for the strategy
- Training for new techniques
- Evaluation systems to quantify results
- Recognition and reward systems
- Continuous feedback
What is a Process?
A process is any activity or group of activities that takes an input, adds value to it, and provides an output to an internal or external customer. Processes utilize resources to create value for the customer and the community.
For example, an employee at a government agency uses paper and ink (input), prints a document as needed (adding value by printing only what is necessary), and provides the requested information (output). Processes involve actions.
Production Process
A production process is any process that comes into physical contact with the hardware or software to be delivered to an external customer up to the point at which the product is packaged.
Business Process
A business process encompasses all processes and services that support production, such as order processing, engineering change processes, payroll, and manufacturing process design.
Suboptimization
Suboptimization occurs when the focus is on individual parts rather than the whole process. This can lead to departments being evaluated based on goals that are not aligned with the overall needs of the organization.
Maximizing Process Effectiveness (MPE)
MPE is a strategy to ensure that processes produce the maximum benefit for the company. It ensures that activities are interrelated. The objectives of MPE are to make processes effective, adaptive, and efficient. MPE addresses the core issues of office workers by:
- Eliminating waste and bureaucracy
- Eliminating errors
- Minimizing delays
- Maximizing asset utilization
- Promoting understanding
- Being easy to use
- Adapting to changing customer needs
Five Phases of MPE
- Organization
- Understanding the Process
- Improvement
- Modernization
- Measurement and Continuous Improvement Controls
Characteristics of Good Processes
Good processes have:
- A responsible owner
- Well-defined limits
- Defined interactions and internal responsibilities
- Documented procedures
- Defined job duties and training requirements
- Evaluation and feedback control
- Proper controls
Why Focus on Processes?
Focusing on processes allows for:
- Predicting and managing change
- Better use of available resources
- A systematic overview of activities
- Error prevention
- Insight into how errors occur
- Shifting from individual to team-based work