A process is the steps that are taken to achieve a particular goal.
These steps can include tasks, automation and actions based on how the process has been created.
Organizations use business processes to improve their productivity, ensure that they can deliver on their objectives and increate their efficiency.
That is why it is important that these processes are well designed and continuously improved on to ensure that they continue to fulfill the business needs.
What is Process improvement ?
Process improvement is the identification and analysis of existing business processes to identify ways of improving them.
It considers the end to end business process and tries to identify sources of waste such as repetitive steps, bottlenecks and handoffs. This would ensure that the business process is able to meet the organizational goals.
Process improvement is also used to find ways to make a process more efficient and value adding to the customer.
What is a process improvement plan?
A process improvement plan is a proposal that describes how a business process can be improved.
The process improvement plan includes the following information:
- Identify factors that are contributing to inefficiencies.
- Find ways the improve the process.
- Identify how the process performance would be measured.
So how do you create a process improvement plan ?
The first step in creating a process improvement plan is to identify the current process state.
This would involve gathering the requirements, documenting those requirements and then validating and verifying those requirements to confirm that they are correct.
It is important that the current state is identified, documented and understood in order to identify the individual steps in the process.
Once the current state has been documented then the next step in the process improvement plan is the process analysis.
Once the current state is documented and understood only then can it be analyzed for possible improvement.
Process analysis involves analyzing each step in the current process to identify pain points and bottlenecks.
There are numerous possible sources of pain points and they include repetitive manual tasks and numerous hand offs which might lead to bottlenecks in the process.
Some questions that you can also ask the stakeholders which might help in the process analysis include:
- Is this approval task necessary ?
- Would it be better to automate this manual task ?
- Why do we need so many approvers for this process ?
Once the process analysis step has been completed, then the future state can be designed.
The future state would be the improved process that has been streamlined to eliminate waste and improve efficiency.
Some questions that you might yourself to help with the future state design include:
- Which steps in the process can we eliminate ?
- Which manual steps can be automated ?
- How can we use technology to help us improve this process ?
- What can we add to this process to make it more efficient ?
- What were the identified causes of the bottlenecks, is it a process problem or a people problem ?
Once all these questions are answered, then the new process can be designed.
Once the future state is defined, then the next step is to implement the new process.
The future state process implementation might include the purchase of additional organizational resources such as a software application, the hiring of new employees or the retraining of current employees.
Regardless of the level of complexity, process improvement usually requires resources so those resources would have to be planned and budgeted for.
Performance metrics would also need to be created to measure the success of the future process state.
Examples of performance metrics include amount of work completed in a certain amount of time, customer feedback and employee satisfaction.
Once the process improvements are implemented, the process should be regularly reviewed to identify opportunities for improvement because process improvement is an ongoing activity that needs to be regularly conducted to ensure that the processes remain efficient.