Companies need to be increasingly agile to achieve results. Process improvement efforts can be deployed quickly and return results
Business Process Improvement
What Is Business Process Improvement? Business process improvement (BPI) is an approach used to identify and evaluate inefficiencies within the organization. It redesigns existing business tasks, improving their effectiveness, enhances the workflows involved, and optimises performance.
KLA approaches Business Process Improvement engagements in a similar manner to an audit because not all businesses or industries are the same. Understanding and analysing the drivers to improve along the root cause of performance issues, ensures that any change is project led and culture driven ensuring the engagement of employees at all levels of the business to deliver a successful change, transformation and improvement.
KLA utilises a simple 5 stage process
As-Is Process Mapping - This step is key to success and involves meeting with key process stakeholders to conduct “AS-IS” process mapping sessions and create process maps that underline current efficiencies or inefficiencies. Incorporate any feedback from the key stakeholders and finalise the process maps.
Process Map Data Gathering - The next step is to gather data to supply a basis for process improvement, timeliness and customer satisfaction. Data could be gathered from existing reports or subject matter expert estimations. The process data should then be populated on to the process map(s). Then work with key stakeholders to establish the data-oriented process performance improvement goals (e.g. reduce errors, reduce process time, increase customer satisfaction)
Stakeholder Focus Groups - Conduct one-on-one and/or group interviews to determine the areas with the greatest opportunities for improvement based upon the established process improvement goals.
Compile Opportunities for Improvement - Compile and categorise the opportunities for improvement. Then meet with the project manager and project sponsor to share current project results and align remaining direction and likely actions with process improvement goals.
Develop recommendations - Engage with all stakeholder groups to outline the recommendations that will meet the process improvement performance goals identified. Finally, categorise the recommendations so that project teams can be assigned to flesh out and implement the recommendations.
Key Benefits of Process Improvement
Boosting business productivity - Business process improvement can facilitate the automation of a lot of repetitive steps within a process. Process improvements like the elimination of redundant steps, removal of bottlenecks and the introduction of parallel process are often incorporated into the revised version of the process map. These improvements allow employees to spend more time on other activities. This translates into increased productivity and reduced waste.
Employee Satisfaction - Employees get frustrated doing process that are not well thought out, time consuming or error prone –processes that consuming critical working hours leading to inefficient operations. Optimised processes free up employee time that can then be used to focus on the most critical and engaging job functions, thus increasing their satisfaction.
Customer Satisfaction - An optimised process by definition is one that delivers a high-quality result in a timely and efficient manner. Ultimately, these are the things that customers(internal or external) want and therefore drive customer satisfaction.
For further information on Business Process Improvement and how it can help your business contact us for a consultation.