According to surveys conducted, as of 2016, 66% of enterprises run a business process improvement program occasionally or never.
Of the 20% that undertake process improvements, 5% record little to no success, 28% experience success limited to individual departments but do not record enterprise-level success, and 19% experience success after significant difficulties.
With these staggeringly low numbers, especially when you consider the importance of efficient business processes for success for any organization, we have put together our knowledge in this article to inform you of everything you need to know about business process improvement.
So, without further ado, let’s get to it!
Read on…
What is Business Process Improvement?
Before you can work towards improving your company’s business processes, it is imperative to understand what a business process is.
Simply put, a business process is a series of tasks that you or your team members perform repeatedly to create a product or service. This product or service can be for your stakeholder, customer, or sponsor.
A business process aims to provide value to a customer, starting with an objective to the achievement of a goal.
Generally, business processes can be divided into three key types. These types are:
- Managing Business Processes: these processes manage the functioning of a system.
- Operating Business Processes: provide the main business of a company and make up the central income stream.
- Supporting Business Processes: serve the basic business. These include for example human resource management, accounting, and technical support to name a few.
Therefore, you can understand the Business Process Improvement as the exercise of identifying, analyzing, improving, and then reviewing existing business processes.
This is accomplished by mapping out business processes, identifying any inefficiencies, redesigning the process, and then measuring it against the initial design.
Looking for the best business process management software? Read this:
What is the Purpose Behind Conducting Business Process Improvement?
There are many reasons behind the need to improve your company’s business processes.
These reasons can be differentiated as falling into one or more of three categories.
These categories are:
Purpose 1: Reducing Process Time
You may wish to improve your business processes so that you can find ways to carry out steps more efficiently and faster.
Analyzing your processes can help you eliminate unnecessary steps or invest in technology that can make your processes faster.
Purpose 2: Improving the Quality of your Output
You may want to improve your business processes to be able to identify those processes that harm the output you and your team deliver.
Such steps may cause defects and errors.
Therefore, improving your processes can help you deliver a better output while using the same input of resources.
Purpose 3: Avoiding Waste
Improving your business processes can help you discover wasteful steps letting you cut them out of your workflow.
This can help you with the first two goals mentioned above, but can also help you increase your overall productivity.
Cutting out unnecessary steps can free up your team’s time to focus on value increasing work.
Which Business Process Improvement Methodology Should You Use?
There are different types of methodologies you can adopt when looking to improve your processes.
Deciding which methodology to choose can be a whole other ball game, so here are some of the different methodologies available to choose from.
1. Six Sigma
This method allows companies to measure inconsistencies or defects in a process so that you can deliver better products and services.
This methodology has further two sub-methodologies. Namely, DMADV for creating new processes, and DMAIC for improving your existing processes.
DMADV follows these steps:
- Define: you need to define the process goal, while also keeping in line with the company’s overall strategy and your customer’s needs.
- Measure: you need to measure which factors are critical to the quality of your product or service.
- Analyze: once you have defined and measured, you need to analyze various options regarding design and development.
- Design: you now need to design your process
- Verify: lastly, verify that the design meets your process goals while also meeting customer needs. You need to then implement the process if the pilot is successful.
The sister methodology, DMAIC requires you to:
- Define: identify and define the opportunity for improvement.
- Measure: measure the performance of your existing processes.
- Analyze: analyze your processes so you can highlight any defects, as well as their root causes.
- Improve: address the root causes and improve the process.
- Control: you now need to control the improved process as well as future process performance so that you can avoid any defects should deviation occur.
DMADV uses a cause and effect analysis and should be conducted is your processes do not meet the required standards even after improvement.
2. Total Quality Management
Total quality management is a business improvement methodology.
This methodology is best for those environments that are constantly changing. The methodology incorporates a system of practices, tools, and training techniques that will adapt along with customer needs.
This methodology encourages:
- Teamwork
- Obligation-based continuous improvement
- Improvement ownership is driven by a need to keep up with customer demands.
If you want to use total quality management there are certain general principles you should follow. These include:
- Your organization should follow a systematic and strategic approach to achieve your goals
- All employees of your company should work towards the same goals. Everyone can understand what classifies as quality through effective communication and training.
- Quality levels are determined by customers
- Your organization will define what steps are required for any process and then monitor performance accordingly.
- Your company should continually be looking for means to be more effective and more competitive in the market.
3. Lean Manufacturing and Lean Thinking
This methodology aims to reduce waste from processes.
With Lean Thinking your company aims to:
- Mend imbalanced production quantities
- Reduce production bottlenecks
- Avoid inventory errors
- Fix product defects
- Reduce wastage
- Better transport inefficiencies
Lean Manufacturing tries to maximize all your business processes that add value. You also want to reduce or preferably remove steps that do not add value.
4. The Infamous Kaizen Methodology
Kaizen is a Japanese term that means “to take part” and “to make good”.
With the Kaizen methodology, your company will make small incremental changes. These changes should be routinely applied over a significant period to allow improved performance.
The Kaizen methodology aims to improve productivity while also eliminating wasteful activities that occur in business processes.
5. PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
The PDCA cycle comes from the Kaizen philosophy. This methodology addresses the entire range from the beginning to the end.
By following the steps, plan-do-check-act, when performing projects your team can maximize effectiveness as well as long-term success.
This type of methodology is suitable to be adopted by any business as well as any department in an organization.
Recommended Readings:
- How to Get Started with a Process Improvement Plan?
- Your Go-To Guide to Create a Quality Management Plan
Tools to Aid Your BPI
With the amount of preparation and management involved in any improvement to your processes, help from tools can make the process easier.
Here are some tools that can help you in your improvement journey.
1. Kanban Boards
Kanban boards give you a visual overview of your entire process and workflow.
Kanban provides flexibility and you can divide your board as you wish, thus giving you as detailed a view of your processes as you like.
With this visibility, you can gain clarity as to where you can make adjustments for more efficient processes.
Moreover, since the board is available for your whole team, every member can see the processes at a glance and this in turn allows you to take a more collaborative approach to improve your business processes.
2. Flowcharting
Flowcharting, much like Kanban boards, provides a detailed breakdown of processes into individual steps.
With flowcharting, you and your team can better understand the processes and the efforts behind every step of the process.
A good flowchart can help your team communicate and clarify what is happening or what processes in your organization need to improve.
3. Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a great way to gather information related to your processes.
With mind mapping, you can link important pieces of information, manage interconnections, link to documents, and other summaries for each piece of data.
You can also use mind mapping to create a work breakdown structure that will give you an overview of your process.
By using a mind map you can organize the findings of your new processes. This can make the processes of relaying new process improvements to your team or stakeholders easier.
Conclusion
We hope this guide will help you to carry out your business process improvement rather than just theorizing about it.
To get started, why not try nTask, it’s super effective for streamlining simultaneous business improvement processes.
So, what are you waiting for? Go at it and get to process improving!
Originally published at https://www.ntaskmanager.com/ on 29th Oct 2020
