Business Process

How to map a process?

By writing down or charting down the steps in the process. Asking participants to specify the inputs necessary for their work, to describe the work they do, and to identify the outputs. Ask them, "Who receives your outputs? What do they do with the outputs? How does the quality of your outputs affect their job?

How to select a process for improvement when there are several processes to choose from?

Create a points system based on criteria such as: 1) Source for customer dissatisfaction 2) Risk 3) Easy to change 4) Opportunity for improvement 5) Source for staff frustration 6) Cost saving potential etc. 7) Criticality of the process - core vs. support process.

What are the phases of a BPR?

1) Analysis phase 2) Design phase 3) Implementation phase

What are the 6 phases of BPI?

1) Plan - an existing business process you want to improve, define its scope, and assemble your team. 2) Analyze: Closely examine the process you've identified as a candidate for improvement. 3) Redesign: Determine what changes you want to make to the target process. 4) Acquire resources: Obtain the personnel, equipment, and other resources needed to make the process changes called for in your redesign. 5) Implement: Carry out the process changes. 6) Continually improve: Constantly evaluate the target process's effectiveness and make further changes as necessary.

What are formal process improvement methodologies?

1) Six Sigma - Motorola 1980s 2) Total Quality Management - Popularized in Japan adter WW-II. 3) ISO 9000 - International Organization for Standardization -Guarantees that a business is using consistent processes. 4) Business Process Reengineering - Radical redesign for dramatic improvement - Michael Hammer and James Champy 1990s

How to select a process to improve?

1. Certain procedures seem overly complicated. 2. Tasks take longer to complete than they did previously, or there is noticeable variation in the amount of time different people take to perform the same task. 3. Things don't get done right the first time. Your team's performance is declining, or the team is consistently failing to reach agreed-upon goals. 4. Employees are expressing frustration over confusing processes or bottlenecks that prevent them from fulfilling their job responsibilities.

How to create a functional activity flowchart?

1.Define the process boundaries. With your business process improvement team, identify the activities or decisions that mark the process's beginning and end. 2.Document the job titles of people involved in the process. On the left-hand side of a piece of paper, list the job titles of all the people who work in the process. 3.Create "swim lanes." Separate the job titles with horizontal or vertical lines. These become "swim lanes," which enable you to follow the work of individuals, see where handoffs occur, and identify imbalances of work among participants in the process. 4.Add process details. For each job title in your chart, insert a box representing what that person does in the process. Inside the box, use verb-noun combinations to describe what that person does. For example, "Receive application" or "Set up file." 5.Insert diamonds representing decisions people must make while carrying out the process. Inside the diamonds, use questions to represent the decisions. For example, "Is file complete?" or "Was log-out OK?" 6.Show the sequence of activities. Number each box and diamond in your flowchart to indicate the sequence in which activities are carried out during the process. Ensure that each box and diamond has a unique number.

How to analyze existing business process?

1.Map the existing process (documenting the way work flows through the process). 2.Examining the process map to identify problems. 3.Interviewing stakeholders (including customers) to gain their insights on the process. 4.Benchmarking how other organizations handle this process. After following these steps, you should have a set of documents that precisely describe the existing process and include ideas for improving the process.

How to do BPR?

Ask questions such as why we do what we do. This will help orgnazations identify underlying rules and assumptions that are obsolete and inappropriate and eliminating them in the new design.

How to map a process?

Document all activites that happen during the process. Create a flow chart. Sybmols - 1. box - an activity a person or system performs 2. Diamond - a review or decision 3.arrow - direction of work flow 4. triangle - filoing or storage of material or info 5.big D - waiting in queue - such as batching or waiting for info or bottlenecks, equipment breakdowns etc. 6. oval - beginning or end of a process map 7. circle - a cross reference to another process. Create a macro map and a functional (detailed) map.

Describe analysis phase?

During this phase, 1) Obtain a detailed understanding of the customer and market requirements 2) Obtain an indepth understanding of current processes. 3) Current processes can also be benchmarked against industry best practices. 4) Identify processes which are candidates for reengineering and where efforts should be focussed first. Design specifications are developed from customer requirements, current processes and baseline analysis. Design specs are a rough blue print for the reengineering design.

How to examine the map for problems?

Examine each component of your process map, asking yourself questions such as: 1. At which points does this process break down or experience delays? 2.At which points do people typically experience frustration with the process? 3.Which parts of the process seem to consume an inordinate amount of time? 4.Which parts of the process lead to low-quality outcomes? 5.Which parts of the process incur unacceptable costs?

How to define BPI goals?

If possible express the desired improvement in numerical terms. State how BPI supports organizations' goals. Joe, for instance, determines that improving how his office sets up new accounts will help his company achieve its strategic goal of serving customers more efficiently and quickly. The process of setting up accounts directly affects customers' satisfaction levels and has links to the other processes involved in approving loan applications, such as evaluating applicants' credit histories. Joe expresses the desired improvement as: "Customers have to provide financial information only once in order to establish an account with us."

What is business process reengineering?

It is the fundemental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve a dramatic improvement in contemporary measures of performace such as cost, quality, service and speed.

What happens in organizations using BPI?

Managers and employees know their business processes and capture them in process maps, procedure manuals, or agreed-upon "ways of doing things." Managers track the performance of processes in the form of metrics that can assess the quality of inputs and outputs or gauge the effectiveness of activities. Top management systematically invests in its processes. In some cases, these investments are intended to improve current operations—for example, enhancing the efficiency of order processing.

Alternative definition of business process?

One can also think of business processes as the series of events that bring together people, technology, and information in ways that create valuable outputs.

Scope, goals and schedule - What is BPI scope?

Scope defines what will and won't be included in the effort. For example, to improve the way his office sets up new accounts, Joe decides to focus on changing the way people and technology interact to establish accounts. He prefers not to change people's jobs or adopt new technologies if he can help it.

How to interview stakeholders?

Stakeholders might include your supervisor, peer managers, employees, and even customers and suppliers. Ask them how they view the process and what they think works well and not so well in the process. Invite them to offer suggestions for improvement. In interviewing stakeholders, don't forget to ask customers what they want from the process. Then fill out a report indicating how they would "grade" your team on each requirement and what "A" level performance would look like—to them—for each.

What is a busines process?

Technically, a business process is the set of steps a business performs to create value for customers. A process consists of three basic components: Inputs: They start the process. For example, if you're building a bicycle, the inputs are the tires, wheels, nuts, bolts, chains, gears, and so forth. Activities: These transform inputs into outputs. In the bicycle example, activities would include building a frame, attaching the wheels, and tuning the gears. Outputs: Sometimes also called outcomes, outputs are the results of the activities—in this example, the finished bicycles.

What is a swim lane flowchart?

The swim lane flowchart differs from other flowcharts in that processes and decisions are grouped visually by placing them in lanes. Parallel lines divide the chart into lanes, with one lane for each person, group or subprocess. Lanes are labelled to show how the chart is organized.

How to benchmark against competitors?

To benchmark how industry competitors perform the process in question, consider the following sources of information: industry trade associations that conduct benchmarking studies, accounting and consulting firms that specialize in your industry, distributors that handle competitors' products, former employees of rival companies, public documents published by competitors (such as annual reports and press packages), rival companies' customers and suppliers. Prepare a list of questions to present to people you interview. Your list may include questions such as "How have you eliminated points in this process where employees experience frustration?" and "How do you currently prevent bottlenecks in this process?"

what are the sources for benchmarking?

To generate ideas for which organizations you might benchmark, use sources such as research companies, consultancies, industry studies, industry trade associations, and former employees of competitors. You can also contact organizations yourself and conduct brief interviews with managers and executives about how their company carries out the process in question.

What is adopting a process mindset?

When you have a process mindset, you regularly think about how to improve the way your group turns inputs into desired outputs. You seek to understand the quality of your group's business processes by using measurements and process mapping to discover and correct weak points.

How to determine schedule?

define schedule, specify which milestones you'll need to achieve in order to change the problematic process and approximately when you expect to reach each milestone. For example, Joe's BPI milestones include mapping the current new-account process within two months and conducting a trial run of a revised process by the end of the third quarter.