Know Your Process Capability & Fix Its Limitations

Every organisation—big or small—relies on business processes to function. In fact, business processes are at the heart of your operational capability and how they perform directly impact your organisation’s success. So, while inefficient processes slow down decision-making and hurt employee productivity, optimised processes increase efficiency and greatly improve overall organisational performance. 

According to the research firm IDC, companies lose up to 20 to 30% in revenue each year due to process inefficiencies. 

Forward thinking leaders look everywhere they can to optimise their operational processes.

Why?…  Because they know that over the days, weeks, and months the improvements gained all add up to a meaningful sum of cash.

Process improvement driven cost reduction signifies higher profit margins and a healthier budget. It is also one of the key measures of success for Business Improvement programmes.  However, avoid the temptation to develop a process optimisation strategy driven by pressure to cut down the budget randomly or by trimming expense from items that are essential for the healthy running of the business.  There are waste driven opportunities all around us.  The secret is in how we identify them.

Identifying medium to long term opportunities and achieving sustained process optimisation can be a challenge.  Opportunity wastes are notoriously difficult to identify and measure and it is estimated that around 20% of businesses struggle to find the managerial bandwidth to build the capability within their teams to achieve their optimisation goals.

Unfortunately, there are no short cuts in process optimisation.  The improvement approach we use is Process Mapping and if used correctly, its adoption delivers significant benefits including optimising costs, improving operational efficiency to mitigating risks and improving customer service.   

That said, effective Process Mapping requires careful planning, communication, and collaborative operation-wide efforts. While some operations start the Process Mapping practice with a bang, many lose momentum or fail to achieve their goals. 

At Productive Industries we recommend a 6-point checklist to ensure successful Process Mapping activities derive maximum output from our client’s investment in time and resources:

Be clear on your goals beforehand

To set the right foundation for your Process Mapping activity, it’s crucial that you clearly define your purpose. You should be fully aware of: 

What objective do you want to achieve?

Is it increasing productivity, reducing cost, improving efficiency or customer service? For the right start, the real goal should be identified before embarking on the activity. 

What problem is it going to solve?

It could be the elimination of waste in the process, improving asset reliability or achieving standardisation.  Whatever the goal, the team should be on the same page in terms of recognising the key problem to address. 

Identify the right processes for improvement

Understanding from where to initiate Process Mapping can be overwhelming for some operations. However, identifying your objective and problem area points you to the right processes to get you started. For instance, if your objective is reducing customer complaints, then you need to start with high-frequency customer service processes with poor customer service ratings or with higher material failure or delivery delay times. 

Capture process-related analytics

Many operations spend a lot of time mapping processes but want to quickly get past the analysis stage. However, gathering process analytics is a key step that points to the process issues and in turn, helps in identifying improvement opportunities. Process insights, such as time and cost of doing a process, non value added activity within a process and process cycle efficiency prove crucial in identifying process bottlenecks and deciding the business improvement journey.

Ensure team participation and involvement

Team-wide participation and engagement is a critical ingredient to gain the maximum output from your Process Mapping improvement activity. Apart from the leadership team, it is important to involve the process owners right at the start. Keeping teams updated about improvement goals and objectives makes colleagues feel connected with improvement ideas and addresses the issues of resistance to change. Also, since the process owners are closest to executing the process, they can give crucial insights on process performance and areas for improvement.

Ensure the right support, experience and expertise is available

A lot depends on the quality of leadership, coaching and facilitation support given to teams whilst carrying out Process Mapping activity. Hence, it’s imperative that you evaluate the experience and expertise of any support you may be tempted to use. Look for powerful examples of medium to large scale end to end mapping activities that have led to significant, tangible returns.  

Make ‘The Brilliant Basics’ part of your operational DNA

Finally, creating high-performing teams enables managers, team leaders, and colleagues to achieve world-class levels of Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost, and People performance.  However, getting there requires the adoption of an essential set of practices that when done well and done habitually combine to create a results mechanism that we call ‘The Brilliant Basics’. The Brilliant Basics (of which Process Mapping is one) is not a one-and-done initiative. It is a continual journey. You need to continually monitor, measure, and improve the process and expand improvement to other areas of the operation. Thus, the focus should be on driving a cultural shift within the organisation, making ‘The Brilliant Basics’ business as usual.

We hope you’ve enjoyed and gained value from reading this article.  From everyone at Productive Industries we wish you every success with your Process Optimisation activities.