Process Organizations Succeed
Written by Leon Spackman, Director Business Process Services
It used to be that selling a product or service that was good enough was good enough. Not so anymore. With the globalization of the business world, even being 99.9 percent accurate and effective may not be good enough any more. This accuracy rate still means that 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes would ship each year or 5.5 million cases of soft drinks produced would be flat. Over the last 30 years, our economy has been shifting away from manufacturing as we have outsourced and moved to offshore production. It is estimated that 80% of U.S. industry today is service related, not manufacturing. A great deal of opportunity exists for companies to improve the way they provide information and services. For these organizations, 99.9 percent accurate means 103,260 income tax returns would be processed incorrectly each the year and 18,322 pieces of mail would be mishandled every hour.
What’s a company to do? Delivering a quality product or service requires resources and time, both commodities in short supply in today’s hectic business environment. But organizations whose leadership demands attention to processes become more agile, more competitive, and ultimately, more profitable. Shifting to a process driven management style more than outweighs the investment in money and time by personnel to learn a business process management model.
Process driven management allows leaders to understand their business, know what is happening in real time, and continually examine how it to improve the speed and accuracy of delivery. The significant improvement in delivering customer value more efficiently and effectively, whether the end result is a product or service ensures bottom line impact.
Process driven organizations operate according to the process management model, which means they understand that:
- Work is a series of tasks that yield a result
- Work starts with input that is acted upon and changed to produce an output used by the customer
- Work should be based on customer requirements
- Work is always linked to strategic goals
Embracing process mapping techniques gains several advantages for an organization, each of which feeds upon the next to improve the bottom line. Before an organization can become process driven, it must understand the processes they use. A process map is a way to examine processes and their inter-relationships, identify redundancies, waste, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. Defining processes through a clear map, like inProcess creates, allows for:
- Employee understanding of how his/her job impacts the company.
- Standardization of procedures and reduced variation of a product or service.
- Easier new employee training/orientation and less impact from employee turnover.
- Customer satisfaction – customers know they can rely upon the organization for delivery of a quality product or service in a timely manner.
- Continuous innovation to keep pace with business change and competitive opportunities.
- Improved financial performance through reduction in errors and rework.
- Operational excellence – reduction in errors, lost days, customer complaints, etc.
- Foundation for continual improvement- it’s easy to see what’s working well and what needs to be improved.
- Compliance with quality programs, laws and regulations.
Of course, none of these things can be done without effective leadership and communication between everyone who is involved with the process. 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.
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