Process Mastering

How to Establish and Document the Best Known Way to Do a Job

Paul Harsin, Ray W. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351421331
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

The benefits include: cost reduction; increased productivity; improved safety; higher morale; and the ability to meet the changing expectations of your customers.Step-by-step, the authors guide you through the creation and implementation of a process master. You will learn:Identify and gain control of your organization's key processes.Get the right people involved.Establish boundaries and measures.Use the process master to support ISO and HACCP complianceProcess Mastering contains two fully completed sample Process Masters as well as numerous improvement examples. An appendix provides blank Process Master forms and shows you how to use a Deployment Flow Chart.

Chapter 1

LAYING THE FOUNDATION: THE AIM OF THIS BOOK

Workers want to do good work, and they know best the details of doing their jobs. We are offering a method to utilize their knowledge in a way that helps everyone in the organization be successful.

We define process mastering as a discipline that focuses on reducing variation and increasing knowledge of processes through the efforts of experts, linking customers and suppliers. In this case, the experts are the people who do the work in the process every day. These people, in a short amount of time, can arrive at the best known way to do their work. In doing so, they will consider what internal and external customers want, what the process needs from its suppliers, and what is required of everyone who works in the process. The result of their brief effort is a process master that can be the foundation for continual improvement of the process.

Process mastering is a simple but powerful basic procedure available to anyone wanting to improve. We commend it to your attention.

Desired Outcome

With this tool, supervisors and workers will be able to communicate in an open, nonthreatening, and constructive manner. Activities that cross department or process boundaries will become clearer, cleaner, less contentious, and will result in fewer balls being dropped. Quality of output will be clearly seen by the customer. The organization will learn faster and more consistently. A culture valuing long-term, steady improvement will flourish. Fewer workers will be injured on the job. Workers will have more pride and joy in their work, and profits will improve.

This is a substantial vision for such a simple procedure. Be assured, the items in this vision are eminently achievable.

Many organizations are still not adapting fast enough to a customer-centered economy where customers can buy from any one of a dozen excellent suppliers. A few years ago, customers were thought of as a collective pain in the neck. Today, we recognize and understand that they represent the only way an organization can stay in business. Today, quality of product and service is the price of admission to the market. And today, you may have a stable customer base. Tomorrow, however, your customers may move to another supplier in search of higher quality, lower prices, reliable delivery, and more dependable service—without you even sensing you have a problem.

How can you retain such fickle, demanding customers? How can you out-compete the world-class giants? What weapons can you pull out of your sleeve to beat your competition?

Computer technology? Can you develop overwhelming market strength with the latest computer technology? Probably not. Anyone with capital can get good computer systems.

Miracle automation? It may help temporarily, but without optimizing the process, robots may be doing unnecessary tasks faster than workers did before. Companies that go the automation route foster an arms race with their competitors.

Low-cost labor? Factoring in transportation, productivity, and quality of output, labor costs are becoming more uniform around the world.

New markets in the Orient? There are lots of potential customers in China, but they must somehow acquire disposable income if they are to buy your product.

Faster application of process knowledge? Now you’re on the track. “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage” (Arie de Geus). We believe that continuously improving processes is critical to future success.

A Focus on the Process

In 1982, IBM began to focus on process improvement as a way to enhance their competitiveness. Kane wrote about IBM’s customer demands: “Customers had higher expectations, competitors were delivering increasingly better products, and it was prohibitively expensive to fix problems.” They began a business focus on processes as a way to become more competitive. Kane and his group observed some fundamental characteristics about work processes involving people:

• Processes adapt over time toward comfort, rather than toward competitiveness.

• Everyone works within a process and someone must be responsible for every process.

• The elements of any process, that the manager controls—people, materials, information, and techniques—are applied with great variability.

Some symptoms indicating poor process health are:

• Internal and external customer complaints

• Returns and declining customer satisfaction

• Things that have to be done over again

• Problems that never get resolved

• Missed deadlines

• Worsening morale and staff turnover

• Exceeded budgets and declining productivity

• Unproductive contention between individuals and/or departments

• Adding manpower as a solution to problems

• Systems that can’t handle the current workload

• Unsatisfactory audits.

Getting Better Results

It has been our experience that when variation in any work process is reduced, the results get better. Variation is believed to result from people, methods, materials, machines, the environment, and their interactions. Process mastering reduces the variation caused by people and methods, making it much easier to find the causes of variation in the other three factors. If we can eliminate differences in methods, where methods are important, we can reduce the variation from this source. At the same time, process mastering helps people understand their work better. Developing a process master is not making a wish list of how you would like the process to be; rather, it is capturing the best known way and putting it into practice. Process mastering improves the quality of output.

Why Process Mastering Works

Think for a minute about organizations you know. Do they have any standard operating procedures (SOPs)? Many organizations, especially small entrepreneurial businesses, have never documented their procedures at all. Who writes most SOPs? The engineers and managers? Who reads them? Are they used by process workers? What happens to most SOPs? We have observed that many are put on a shelf or in a file cabinet for years. When a new manager arrives in the office, the old SOPs may be dusted off and read. By this time, they have no relationship to the actual working processes. The old SOPs are junked and the cycle starts anew.

Imagine a common situation for a moment. Six workers make widget frames. If each of those people have been working on the process for a couple of years, there are probably six different ways of making the frames. One flips the frame over after assembly and pounds it twice with a hammer to even it out. Two others squeeze their frame pieces together by tightly pushing in on two ends while clamping. The rest use a variety of methods based on what works best for them today. If the SOP has not been changed in those two years, it probably is outdated.

This lack of working standards leads to confusion, variation in quality and quantity of output, and unnecessary costs. It can also mean longer training times, more customer complaints, higher turnover rates, lower morale, higher accident rates, production rates not meeting expectations, longer cycle times, more scrap, and less supervisory control. The longer the process continues without current standards, the less manageable the process becomes.

Process masters are written by the workers and supervisors, with the expectation that these documents will be the basis of the next set of process masters. The focus of process mastering is not on writing strict standards, but on guiding the workers to write living standards. Process masters are expected to be superseded and are written for easy updating. Process masters are usually posted near the work areas. Since workers own the process masters, they will follow them more diligently than the old SOPs.

Process mastering is not designed to regiment people into mindless compliance, and it is not standardization for the sole purpose of having rigid standards. In our experience, having rigid job descriptions or standards restricting areas of responsibility reduces cooperation and adaptation to changing demands.

Process mastering is definitely not to be thought of as primarily a way of eliminating workers’ jobs. If it is used this way, it will be unsuccessful. Neither is it a way of transferring the responsibility for quality improvement away from leaders. As with any effective management philosophy, leaders need to be involved.

Process mastering also adds value in hidden ways. Many important factors are not easily measurable. Here are some examples, paraphrased from Out of the Crisis (pp. 121–122).

• The multiplying effect on sales that comes from having a happy customer.

• The boost in productivity that comes from successful improvement of quality upstream from the process.

• The improvement in qualit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Laying the Foundation:The Aim of This Book
• Chapter 2: The Best Known Way
• Chapter 3: Management’s Role
• Chapter 4: Tricks, Traps, and Alligators
• Chapter 5: Stories, Measurements, and Examples
• Chapter 6: Special Applications of Process Mastering
• Chapter 7: Closing Words
• Appendix A: Process Mastering Forms
• Appendix B: Process Mastering Checklists
• Appendix C: Measures
• Index