 Business processes are the steps that all businesses perform in order to achieve customer satisfaction. It's logical that the better the steps, the greater the customer satisfaction. However, in a business where thousands of steps are performed across multiple departments by multiple staff it's easy to lose sight of the shared goal of customer delight.
What's needed is 'big picture' visibility as well as a detailed understanding so that the process steps can be aligned with the business strategy to efficiently deliver effective customer delight.
 Business process improvement is a management function to provide the strategy "top-down" to staff so the staff can understand their job alongside their colleagues, help them align their processes, provide the technology & tools and also knowledge to achieve their job "bottom-up". That's (continuous) business process improvement.
Five Phases of Business Process Improvement
Business process improvement has five phases:
- Organise the improvements (create and manage the project)
- Understand the processes (document, diagram, flowchart)
- Streamline the processes (apply staff knowledge to...)
- eliminate bureacracy
- eliminate duplication
- add value
- simplify
- error proof
- reduce cycle time
- standardise
- improve supplier partnerships
- improve strategy
- automate
- Measure & Control the processes (motivate, target, measure)
- Continuous Process Improvement (repeat as a business culture )
It's a difficult task, but the rewards are vast, and each step towards improvement delivers benefits. Indeed, its not a destination, its a process itself. The world goes on improving. Those businesses that adopt improvement as a culture succeed, the rest drop by the wayside looking on.. |
