Think "Business Processes" Not "Departments" - 5 Compelling
Article:
1. Process Thinking follows the natural flow of the
business
A business process is a collection of interrelated work tasks
triggered by an event and geared towards providing results or
outcomes valued by the "customer". The adoption of process
thinking causes an organisation to align its activities and
systems with the natural flow of materials and information from
the start to the end of the value chain.
Functional thinking creates silos with boundaries across which
information and other resource flows are not seamless, leading
to the absence of a shared understanding of what the business is
about, what factors are critical to the achievement of
objectives and how efforts can be coordinated to best attain
those objectives.
Carry out an experiment in your organisation. Take any core
process: ask five managers in different departments involved in
the process the following questions.
* Describe this process
* Who are the customers to the process?
* What valued outcomes do they expect?
* Who are the suppliers to the process?
* What inputs do they provide?
* What is the cycle time for this process?
If yours is a functionally oriented organisation, their
answers, where they understand your questions at all, are likely
to be all different. Some processes you might consider are order
processing, product development, recruitment etc.
2. Business Process Thinking focuses the organisation on
customer needs
Because of the insistence on definite identifiable outcomes
valued by the customer, process thinking helps the organisation
focus on correctly identifying and satisfactorily meeting and
exceeding their expectations. Measures of performance are tied
to current customer satisfaction levels as well as the
enhancement of capacity to satisfy the customer in the future.
Departmental or functional thinking is, on the other hand,
focused on internal measures of no value to the customer.
Examples of the different kinds of measures are input measures
(e.g. items delivered by suppliers), process measures (e.g.
cost, time, involvement, efficiency) and output (e.g.
timeliness, quality, ease of use, returns on investment)
measures. Decisions on appropriate measures must meet the dual
requirements of value to the customer and improvability.
3. Business Process Thinking Encourages Focus on Value
Addition
Organisations that have adopted a business process mentality
constantly strive to ensure that certainly all their processes,
and as much as possible, all activities within those processes
contribute towards the final outcome paid for by the customer.
All non-value adding processes and activities are eliminated or
minimised.
Many functionally oriented organisations for example have
lengthy approval requirements that serve no purpose. A company
drastically collapsed its approval chain after an experiment in
which unsuspecting approvers failed to detect that the documents
they had just endorsed only had the usual cover sheet
followed by a sheaf of blank sheets. This meant they were
approving requests without reading the contents! Talk about
non-value addition!
Consider also that in many processes the actual contact time
between a process document or work piece and the workers or
process operators is usually a ridiculously small fraction of
the process cycle time. The balance of the time is wasted on
such non-value activities as waiting, unnecessary movement,
locating misplaced items or documents etc.
4. Business Process Thinking Encourages a Focus on Quality
The bane of good quality products or services in majority of
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organisations is the variation or inconsistency of process
outcomes. Organisations with a process mentality continuously
ferret out and eliminate sources of variation to achieve
consistent results. This is almost impossible to achieve within
functionally oriented organisations as their narrow focus
prevents awareness of the causes of problems that span
functional boundaries.
While a functional organisation might call for an arbitrary
amount of improvement in quality (e.g. 10% reduction in defects)
process oriented organisations apply a fact-based understanding
of the relationship between results and the processes that drive
them. Statistical tools are used to study what factors have the
most significant impact and effort is focused on influencing
these factors.
5. Business Process Thinking Institutionalises High
Performance and Guarantees Execution of Organisational
Priorities
A focus on business processes institutionalises high performance
in the following ways.
* Uses measures of performance that are meaningful to the
customer and other stakeholders. This is very important in view
of the axiom that what gets measured gets done. Rewards are
aligned to measures, which in turn support valued customer and
organisational outcomes. * Standardises processes by minimising
waste and variation, drastically reducing defects and improving
speed of delivery.
About the author:
Samuel Okoro is the CEO of Leapfrog Alliance Ltd, a management
training and consulting firm that helps organisations located in
the African region to improve quality and reduce costs through
better business processes. His personal passion is to help move
African business to world-class levels. For further details
please visit http://leapfrogalliance.com.
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