The Power of Business Process Improvement

10 Simple Steps to Increase Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Adaptability

Susan Page

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780814414798
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Baffled by repeated mistakes in your department? Want to focus your employees' limited time on more valuable work? The answer to these challenges and more is business process improvement (BPI). Every process in every organization can be made more effective, cost-efficient, and adaptable to changing business needs. The good news is you don't need to be a BPM expert to get great results. Written by an experienced process analyst, this how-to guide presents a simple, bottom-line approach to process improvement work. With its proven 10-step method you can: Identify and prioritize the processes that need fixing * Eliminate duplication and bureaucracy * Control costs * Establish internal controls to reduce human error * Test and rework the process before introducing it * Implement the changes Now in its second edition, The Power of Business Process Improvement is even more user-friendly with new software suggestions, quizzes, a comparison of industry improvement methods, and examples to help you apply the ideas. Whether you are new to BPI or a seasoned pro, you will have business running better in no time. 

CHAPTER |1

The Roadmap

Learning How to Navigate

Have you ever had a problem that you know little or nothing about land on your desk at work? Does the problem make you feel overwhelmed and uncertain as to where to begin? Challenges like this usually occur when you already have a full workload, unrealistic deadlines, and limited resources. What can you do when you feel lost, like Hansel or Gretel trying to find your way out of the forest?

Learning to navigate through unfamiliar territory goes a long way toward easing the burden and can help you feel comfortable dealing with the unknown. Business process improvement (BPI) work, the systematic examination and improvement of administrative processes, can seem scary and overwhelming because no one teaches this navigation skill in school. But once you give it some thought, everything is a process, from making breakfast for yourself in the morning to building the space shuttle. In both cases, you follow a series of actions or steps to bring about a result. Making breakfast, no matter how informal, is still a process. You brew the coffee, cook the eggs, and toast the bread. If Vince Lombardi had run a business instead of a football team, we might remember him today for saying that process isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

The techniques covered in this book help smooth the path to successful BPI by clearing away the unknowns and delivering the power of process improvement directly into your hands. Whether you consider yourself an expert on the subject or do not see yourself as a process person, you will appreciate learning how to tackle process improvement work in a bottomline, straightforward approach. For the inexperienced, The Power of Business Process Improvement guides you along a proven, step-by-step approach to a successful result; for the expert, it becomes a handy A-to-Z reference guide to help you engage an organization in a process improvement effort.

This guide cuts through the long, confusing, and difficult-to-comprehend explanations regarding BPI and takes you directly to the core of what you, the business professional, want to understand. It describes a pragmatic approach to business process improvement that I developed over the years and that anyone can use in real time to solve real problems. The ten simple steps to increasing the effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability of your business processes start with the creation of a process inventory and end with how to keep a business process continually delivering value to the business.

If you want to evaluate how your company hires employees, secures sales, or manufactures a product, examining the underlying processes helps you better understand how the business works. Every day we experience challenges with inefficient or ineffective processes and, after you start thinking of business processes as the foundation to the business, you begin to see the power of having a process focus and wonder why you waited so long to change your perspective.

Bill Gates wrote in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (Business Plus, 2000) that “A rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires.” We have all seen bureaucracy and red tape continually added to a business process. Bureaucracy happens not all at once, but incrementally over time. A business process can easily become bloated, leading to an ineffective, inefficient, and inflexible process.

Improving business processes enables you to stay competitive and to increase your responsiveness to your customers, the productivity of your employees doing the work, and your company’s return on investment. The expertise to examine and understand how business processes work sets you apart from the rest because you have the power to demonstrate the value that the process delivers, its importance to your company, and the effect that a single change can produce.

People become interested in process improvement for any number of reasons. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

Your customers, clients, or suppliers complain about the business process.

You find that your department makes numerous errors and/or makes the same one again and again.

You want to understand how your department can improve its efficiency so that your employees can spend their limited time on more valuable work.

You have accepted responsibility for a new business or department, and you want to understand the work.

You discovered challenges with the handoffs between departments.

You want to increase your department’s productivity.

You noticed duplication of data or tasks in multiple departments.

You started a new job and want to understand how the department works.

If you encountered one or more of these experiences, then BPI can help. It improves your ability to meet your customer’s needs, helps you eliminate errors, identifies opportunities to yield a more effective and efficient process, assists you in learning the end-to-end process for a new part of the business, makes clear the relationship between departments and the roles and responsibilities of each, improves your department’s productivity, and eliminates redundancy.

Working on business processes helps demystify the process and makes a seemingly complex process less intimidating. Process improvement work also gives you the chance to engage a cross-functional team in the work so that everyone can learn the end-to-end business process, instead of simply focusing on his or her own piece of the process. You will find that, as you do the work, few employees understand the end-to-end process. Employees may understand their own piece, but not how the entire process works from beginning to end. When a team works together on improving business processes, the work itself provides a means for colleagues to talk about common topics, and the team effort promotes an understanding of the interconnectivity of their work.

When you focus on a business process, it appears less threatening to colleagues than focusing on the employees who do the work. The process of finding challenges and linking those challenges to the process instead of to a particular employee leads to easier, less threatening solutions. No one employee or group of employees has to worry about repercussions.

On the other hand, BPI does affect the entire business system, including the employees who do the work; the information technology systems that support the process; the measurements established to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability of the process; and reward and recognition programs that exist in a company.

If you still find yourself wondering whether you should undertake a process improvement effort on one of your processes, ask yourself four questions. If you answer no to any of these questions, you should start examining your business processes:

1. Does your process include a high level of customer/client interaction?
2. Does every step in your process add value for the customer/client?
3. Have you established customer- or client-focused metrics for the business process?
4. Are your employees evaluated on their contribution to the business process?

Throughout this book, the term customer refers to someone external to a company who pays money for a product or service. The term client denotes an internal customer within a company.

If you work as an internal consultant in your company, then you probably work with clients. The client’s business processes should support the company’s business goals, which in turn should support the paying customer. Remember, in business process work, the customer is king, and you should always focus on the customer.

Can You Do It?

Many of the process improvement books on the market support the myth that business process improvement must be time-consuming and complex. The Power of Business Process Improvement shows that nothing is further from the truth. It presents you with numerous tools and examples that you can use to make the work simple and yet maintain high standards.

Perhaps you have shied away from process improvement because i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Roadmap: Learning How to Navigate
• Chapter 2: Step 1: Develop the Process Inventory: Identifying and Prioritizing the Process List
• Chapter 3: Step 2: Establish the Foundation: Avoiding Scope Creep
• Chapter 4: Step 3: Draw the Process Map: Flowcharting and Documenting
• Chapter 5: Steps 4–5: Estimate Time and Cost and Verify the Process Map: Introducing the Process and Cycle Time and Gaining Buy-In
• Chapter 6: Step 6: Apply Improvement Techniques: Challenging Everything
• Chapter 7: Step 7: Create Internal Controls, Tools, and Metrics: Making It Real
• Chapter 8: Step 8: Test and Rework: Making Sure It Works
• Chapter 9: Step 9: Implement the Change: Preparing the Organization
• Chapter 10: Step 10: Drive Continuous Improvement: Embracing the New Mindset
• Chapter 11: Create the Executive Summary: Getting the Recognition
• Chapter 12: Case Study: Sharing a Real-World Example
• Index