Maintaining and Improving Business Processes
In the previous articles, I have explored why so many companies have not been able to invest in a comprehensive set of business processes and provided a guideline on how this can be achieved cost effectively. In this article, I will cover how to make the processes sustainable and how to maximise the value-add from a set of comprehensive business processes.
From my experience of introducing comprehensive business process maps in several companies, gaining full adoption of the system requires some effort. There will be departments and certain employees who become the early adopters. Some employees just like the graphical interface and can logically follow the steps. Where attention must be paid are those departments or processes where activities continue to run without reference to the published process. Overall success of the project can only come if all processes are adopted and followed. There are several approaches to ensure that all employees are on-board and able to follow the published processes. These include:
· Hold process reviews with the Process Owner and “process actors”.
· Ensure that the system records training on the new process and each process is only available to individuals once training has been completed.
· Using the Process KPIs, as the process improves, share the successes with staff.
· Always ask for improvement suggestions from the people running the daily processes.
Each Process Owner plays a critical role in observing the process and working with the team to find additional improvements. Quite often this can be combined within a LEAN or 6-sigma program and using tools such as Kaizen, to continue to enhance the processes. Setting metrics for a process is an essential way to see how it is developing. Often the duration of the activities is a measure of how efficient the team can convert the inputs into the outputs. This can be monetarised if appropriate, factoring hourly rates of the players involved in the process. Other metrics that maybe useful are how many times the process requires an escalation to management to complete the process.
The Executive team, and particularly the Process Sponsor, will want to see the larger benefits, that provided the incentive to achieve a comprehensive set of business processes. These will come from several directions, each of them can be quantified, if some data was collected prior to starting the exercise. The following list is not an exhaustive list, but provides some indications of where the major gains come from:
· A comprehensive set of the Financial Processes reduce exceptions, increase accuracy of cash flow, simplify month and year end processes, reduce audit durations, address fiscal requirements and simplify financial forecasting.
· Driving a Quality Management System (QMS) from the operational business processes reduces the size of the QMS document stack, SOPs significantly reduce in size, in-house audits are simplified, and external audits run efficiently.
· The set of HR Processes reduces time to process staff on-boarding, staff appraisals, reduces time for employees to find stuff, reduces training time for all staff and simplifies job descriptions based on the published processes.
· The set of Operational Processes reduces exception handling, material costs minimised, stock levels controlled, temporary labour trained up more efficiently and supplier communication optimised.
· Product and Service development is one of the more complex processes and often the most inefficient. Mapping the Development Processes reduces the inefficiency but probably more significantly, enables a company to enhance the value-added by creating better products and services.
Leaving you with one final anecdote from a previous role, capturing processes may not be on your company’s agenda today, but gaining agreement to do it tomorrow will pay handsomely. Mapping out all the HR processes for a large multinational company, accrued savings of over £450k simply from the time saved by HR staff and line managers knowing how to get things done. The investment in time was about 12 staff running a number of workshops across a 3 month period.