When it comes to managing your business, you’re always striving for maximum efficiency. It’s a given that you want to get most out of it, in terms of productivity, profits, and so on.
Is your business as efficient as it could be, though? More often than not, unless you practice continuous improvement, the answer is no. To really get the most out of your business, you need to achieve process excellence – and in this guide, we’re going to explain how, exactly, you can do that.
What is Process Excellence?
Achieving process excellence means that the processes your business undertakes are executed effectively and efficiently. That implies cutting down on waste and getting results that exhibit minimal variation.
Variation in results is, to a certain extent, inevitable, but that variation must fall within acceptable parameters. Whether a process serves internal or external clients, variation will affect the quality and result in client dissatisfaction.
Think about it from a customer perspective. You buy apple pie at a certain bakery, and it’s fantastic! Next time you buy one, however, you find that they’ve changed the recipe. You are understandably disappointed because you expected a certain quality of apple pie and you’re not getting it. Will you go back for more? Will you recommend it to your friends? Probably not.
What does the bakery need to do? It needs to stick to the process that delivered good results. The same goes for your business. If you can achieve the right “recipe” for performing a business process, you should follow the same methodology every time you repeat the process.
Achieving Process Excellence: Lean, Kaizen or BPM
There are 3 important business philosophies we can turn to for help when striving for business process excellence. Since each addresses excellence using a specific approach, it might even be a good idea to combine all three.
Here’s a brief introduction to each of them, and a few practical tips you can put to work for you.
Getting Lean
Getting Lean and mean is a proven approach to business process excellence. To get Lean, you get mean on the “seven wastes” identified by Toyota when it embarked on a process of doing things better. Lean means a focus on minimizing:
- Transport (from one place to another)
- Inventory (because inventory ties up capital and incurs risk)
- Motion (movements workers must make to perform a task)
- Waiting (to get on with the process)
- Overproduction (that costs money that could be used more productively elsewhere)
- Over-processing (where the extra work done doesn’t matter to the customer)
- Defects (bin it, or rework it – either way, it’s a waste)
Eliminating waste means that you save money on the processes your business undertakes. You can decide whether you pass the saving on to your clients or whether you bank it and improve your profits.
In short, Lean means doing away with everything that is not necessary to the process or that impedes and delays it. To make your business Lean, you’ll need commitment from every person in the organization – not just top management or a group of employees.
The benefits of Lean include:
- Improved productivity
- Fewer defects
- Better product or service quality (leading to a stronger brand, satisfied clients)
Lean can apply to almost any kind of industry, even a service industry, and it is a widely accepted approach to the achievement of business process excellence.
Kaizen: Getting Better All the Time
Kaizen means “improvement.” Toyota wasn’t satisfied with one drive towards process excellence. Instead, it wanted to keep on getting better all the time.
The secret to successful Kaizen is involving everyone. Your aim is to help everyone to do a better job, to work more efficiently, and to become a part of any process improvement initiative. The whole idea is not to make everyone work harder, but to make work smarter, easier to do, and of a better overall quality.
So you’re probably wondering – how, exactly, do you “do” Kaizen? Well, it’s not something that you do. It’s more a management methodology than anything else. Successfully implementing Kaizen means that your company values initiative from employees, who in turn, contribute a lot to any process improvement efforts.
Although Toyota applies Kaizen in a production environment, it can apply to just about everything. Even life-coaches use the Kaizen approach to help their clients to do things better.
The take-home message of the Kaizen approach is that if we want process excellence, we must make excellence a standard rather than a goal. Whenever we diverge from that standard, we need to stop, think, address causes rather than symptoms, and immediately integrate what we’ve learned into our routine way of working.
To learn more about Kaizen, check out our comprehensive guide.
Business Process Management: Constant Process Evaluation & Improvement
Business Process Management (BPM) views businesses as entities whose activities consist of a set of processes. Since you have a defined set of activities, you can also define how the processes they entail should work. You can even plan for contingencies, and you can repeat your processes and get results that meet a certain standard of process excellence.
You can relate BPM to both Kaizen and Lean. Your processes should continually improve, and they should strive to eliminate waste. As soon as you identify a waste you must eliminate, you can quickly entrench the necessary change by altering the business process. As soon as you spot an area for improvement, you act.
BPM is a bit too big of a topic to cover in this article. If you’re like to learn more, check out our article on the ins-and-outs of business process management.
Enforcing Process Improvement with Workflow Software
Once you’ve figured out how to improve processes, and hence, achieve process excellence, you need to actually implement it.
If you’ve ever tried to change anything in an organization, though, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not that easy. While the improvements make sense for the good of the organization, your employees aren’t too keen on changes.
They’ve been carrying out the process the same way for months, if not years. No one wants to re-learn something they’re already good at.
So, how do you overcome inertia and resistance to change? Technology provides the answer.
Workflow management software, such as Tallyfy, helps you digitize your processes. Whenever you have to make changes to your processes, you do it through the software, and it handles the enforcement for you.
As an added benefit, it the system also helps facilitate the process. It assigns tasks and deadlines for your employees automatically, making everything much smoother.
Related Questions
What are the requirements for process excellence?
To truly achieve excellence in any process, five crucial ingredients are needed: clearly established targets, motivated and involved personnel, written steps, frequent measurement, and ongoing enhancement. Teams have to understand what success looks like, have the right tools and training, and follow well-documented steps that everyone can agree on. And most of all there must be a culture where people feel safe to point out problems and propose better ways to work.
How do you measure process excellence?
The gage of process excellence is twofold: the numbers and the experiences. Key metrics are how long things take, how much they cost, how frequently errors occur and how happy customers are. It’s also important to listen to the people doing the work — they are often the first to realize when processes are clunky or frustrating, even if the numbers seem to look all right.
What’s the difference between process excellence and process intelligence?
Process excellence isn’t about making machines do things better so much as making people do workflows better — with human effort and smart planning. Process intelligence is less about comprehending the work and more about the data and technology that helps us understand how the work happens. Process excellence is the journey of improvement, and process intelligence is the GPS that gets you where you’re going.
Why is process excellence important for business growth?
Process excellence is pivotal to the growth and competitive performance of a business. When processes function smoothly as well as effectively, companies lose less money, make fewer costly errors and can do more work without burning out their staff. It’s like having a well-oiled machine which you can rely on to produce high-quality work while adjusting for new challenges.
How does process excellence affect employee satisfaction?
When processes are streamlined, employees spend less time fighting against broken systems and are able to do more meaningful work. They are hitting fewer obstacles, feeling more productive, and able to better connect their work to that of their colleagues. It leads to greater job satisfaction and makes it easier to retain talented people.
What role does leadership play in process excellence?
Leaders set the tone for process excellence by showing teams that they value improvement and giving teams the time and resources to make things better,” he says. It is time for them to walk the talk, to actively engage in improvement (not just direct it!), to get out of the way when the real teams identify problems. Process excellence efforts may flounder without strong leadership backing.
How does technology support process excellence?
By providing a smoother way to track work and identify blockades, technology can launch process excellence. Current workflow tools can pinpoint where work piles up and offer suggestions on how to improve. But technology is not enough – it also needs to be combined with intelligent process design and human understanding.
What are common barriers to achieving process excellence?
The largest obstacles are usually resistance to change, not having time to make improvements, unclear ownership of processes, and communication among teams is not always transparent. It’s a case of people being so busy just keeping the existing processes running that they can’t solicit feedback to improve them. It takes patience and an organized way to break those barriers.
How long does it take to achieve process excellence?
Process excellence is not a destination but a way of doing things. Some improvements, you might see things working out in weeks, and sometimes you just can see things working out in months, and sometimes you have to work at something for that the culture of your organization to become excellent in years. The secret is to start step-by-step, celebrate early wins and incrementally go after more and more daunting challenges, as teams grow in their confidence and capability.
Can small businesses achieve process excellence?
Absolutely! Smaller companies can often beat bigger competitors when it comes to process excellence, since they can react to change with more agility and usually have fewer layers of approval. They can begin with small changes that could have a big effect, from producing clear checklists or establishing basic tracking systems. Process excellence can be applied at any level.
