Is Your Organization Process Driven?
by Leon Spackman, Business Process Director, PMC Solutions

It’s all well and good to say that your organization is process oriented. Sure, everyone knows how to do things. It says so right in the manual that everyone has on the shelf. But how long has it been since you and your employees really paid attention to what they do? Do they truly understand the processes they follow? Do they know how each one relates to the others? Are they aware of the inputs required or the outputs that result from their process? Is your organization truly process driven?

Every process-oriented organization knows that work is a series of tasks that yield a result. Process-driven organizations understand three more things:

• Input are acted upon by employees and changed to produce an output used by the customer
• Customers should be telling you their requirement and expectations
• Work is always linked to strategic goals

The elements that feed business processes - inputs, the process itself, outputs and leadership - all result in satisfied customers. Managers monitor business processes using standard guidelines that are designed to reduce variation, especially crucial if multiple people are doing the same jobs. Satisfied customers are loyal and will recommend your products and services to others, even in the face of adversity.

Working with suppliers and employees and gathering feedback from customers is key to understanding and managing outcomes. Do your managers talk with and understand what customers find useful and important? Do they then communicate these useful and important expectations back to their employees?

Process driven organizations have great potential to drive innovation, competitive differentiation, and bottom line success because they understand their business, know what is happening in real time, and continually examine how to improve the speed and accuracy of delivery.

They do this by understanding the loop across business functions that a process takes, rather than focusing on an isolated task within one department at a time. They do this by feeding data back into the process map from all components of the process: suppliers, employees, customers.

So, being a process-driven organization demands leadership involvement and support so that employees have clear expectations and know they will be held accountable for their actions and outcomes. Employees, in turn, gain increased satisfaction in their jobs because they how they fit into the company’s processes, and ultimately, the bottom line.

Customers know they can rely on you for a quality product or service in a timely manner, because they, too, have been part of the continual innovation that process driven organizations implement.

Helping organizations pay attention to how work is accomplished and how efficiently it gets done is the reason PMC Solutions, and our innovative process mapping software, inProcess®, exist. By helping organizations examine their processes and their inter-relationships, identify redundancies, waste, weaknesses, and discover and implement opportunities for improvement, PMC Solutions turns process-oriented organizations into process-driven ones.

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