Efficiency is a measure of how much resource is used to produce a product or service.

In plain English, efficiency is using or wasting less resources & materials (like time & energy).  A process is more efficient as long as the output, the finished product is the same.

Efficiency is something a service provider or manufacturer particularly desires.

Poor efficiency is often hard to see.  We often get lost in our work and do things the way we have always done them often without questioning why.  Worse still we frequently do things that we think are required which are not.

Some efficiency measurements are:

Agility is a gauge of the ability to change according to predicted or unpredicted demands.

In plain English, an agile process would be able to adapt quickly, smoothly, easily to a new function e.g. an agile telephone company would be able to adapt to serving land-line as well as mobile customers.

An actual measure might be percentage of SPECIAL orders entered in 8 hours.

It's also a measure of how easily an organisation can be flexible to the special requirements or customised requirements of individual customers.  One size does NOT fit all, at least not always. Customers have various needs, and some have very special needs and are even prepared to pay a valuable premium for receiving them.

Some organisations specifically invite business from very demanding customers in order to provide the knowledge, exposure, and pressure which these customers place on their organisation. Thereby, leading to, hopefully, new levels of ability within the organisation.

For any organisation that wants to stay ahead of the competition, a degree of agility is required. For any organisation that wants to innovate, a high degree of agility is required.

Business process improvement is the improvement of the very steps, actions and procedures used by every single organisation to achieve its function. More businesses today are service organisations, and even product based organisations include a significant amount of service. 

Over many decades since the production line, mass production, manufacturing, product based, organisations refined their manufacturing, stock control, quality inspection process so well that now most consumers have come to expect near perfect performance, 5 year guarantees or more. 

However, many SERVICE based organisations still rely on the haphazard, application of the knowledge and skills of human beings who forget, make mistakes, change their minds, disagree, leave, delay, confuse or a whole range of possible errors in performance.  Of course, as human beings, we are also capable of very high levels of performance and agility - when our environment supports us.  Against this totally human nature is an ever complex business world of regulation, policy, documentation, disconnected IT, mountains of data, and customer demand. Humans are surely more difficult, and rewarding, to control than mere machines.  It's a difficult world.

Business process improvement seeks to identify the end goal of a business, namely customer requirements.  From there, work backwards to ensure that each step in a business aims at this goal in the most efficient, effective, agile manner possible.  That sounds like what already happens until you consider the reality for most organisations that may have grown over many years modifying what they do as business grows and customers' demands change.  However, as businesses get bigger it becomes harder and harder to see the total organisation and departments start to form which are disconnected from each other.  The end customer may never be seen by many employees in many organisations.  Adapting to customer needs becomes more difficult.  Special needs demand special, inefficient, and often ineffective responses.

These processes come in two forms: value adding (things the customer is prepared to pay for) and non-value adding (things the customer would not pay for, but which might be necessary to run the business).

Business process improvement seeks to make the detail as well as the 'big picture' total organisation visible,  It sets in place clear process steps which can be targeted, monitored ("What gets measure, gets done"), and thereby adjusted to become ever better and eventually innovate or become even world class.

Business process improvement is a management issue, not a technology issue.  Technology helps to make a great process even better.

Also see the explanation to Business Process Management here.

Business process MANAGEMENT is a more recent term that has been applied to the improvement of business.  It chiefly recognises the fact that businesses need to not just improve as a one-off project activity, they need to constantly, frequently, monitor and review procedures.

See all the points above on Business Process Improvement.

Business Process IMPROVEMENT might be established as a project to focus on an area of an organisation, whilst business process MANAGEMENT emphasises that its a DAILY responsibility of an organisation, its managers, directors, and staff to maintain and improve.

In fact there is little difference between the two terms BPI and BPM other than age and a desire to move business processes into the responsibility of managers and directors.

Innovation is an oft abused term.  Innovation is the creation of something new.  New, as in, never existed before.  Often of course, a new idea is simply a reworked or enhanced old idea, but sometimes the change is so radical that something truly new is created.  It's therefore, not, copying an established idea.

Many organisations are seeking to break their own cultures to adopt new methods and for them innovation is this, adopting new techniques, methods, styles, ideas before the majority of their competitors.

For innovators the costs can be high (consider Sony's generally failed launch of advanced BETAMAX video recording technology, and MiniDisk audio technology) but equally so can the rewards - Sony is, afterall, a highly successful worldwide, respected by suppliers, distributors, manufacturers, and of course, customers.  Compare this to Coca Cola where the breadth of innovation has hardly changed in decades for the end customer, indeed resorts to Classic versions on a frequent basis.

Indeed the major attribute which innovative businesses gain is organisational agility.  Just as in nature with animal and plant life; it's not the biggest organisations that survive, its the ones that can adapt the fastest.

The term world-class is often abused by marketing departments. World class in strict terms refers to the absolute best possible performance available on the planet.  That is equal to near perfection.  The only way to measure the performance of an organisation and gauge whether it is world-class in factual terms rather than simply a marketing department's view is through benchmarking. It's hard for any organisation to be world-class in every single process, indeed, its unnecessary.  What matters are those processes which affect the end customer.  So what if you have the most efficient finance department if your stock keeping is disastrous?

Not just large but also small organisations can be world-class.  For example, a small, family owned software company could be as good, if not better than, a major world-wide software giant - in terms of staff satisfaction, employment record, financial strength, customer delight, stock keeping, agility; a whole list of crucial critical performance measures.  This accounts for the fact that, on a regular basis, a brand new, upstart business is seen to launch a significant new product or service which perfectly addresses customer demands and wipes market share from a bigger, more established company.

Before an organisation reaches the status of world-class there are a number of lower levels which are still highly rewarding and worthwhile attaining, from processes are: Understood, Effective, Efficient, or Error-free, to World Class.  Each level has its own definition.  The journey towards world-class is highly rewarding in itself because it encourages the very culture of an organisation to be far more open and agile to change, to customer service, to SELF-improvement.

For more details see our FREE sheet on Benchmarking