Visualising your work

The key to any business improvement initiative is to apply a consistent approach. As many organisations are unlikely to have business process improvement specialists employed in-house it is important to adopt an approach that will make sense to anyone performing continuous improvement activities on top of their day job.

What is Business Process Improvement?

Business process improvement is applying a structured approach to improve the way you do things.

It’s the effort that goes into identifying, understanding, analysing, re-designing, implementing, and continuously monitoring the processes you want to improve.

A simple and repeatable approach

The approach you follow should be simple and repeatable:
1.  Map your current process
2.  Analyse where the problems exist and identify the non-value adding steps
3.  Design your future process and determine what’s required to remove the non-value adding steps
4.  Determine what gaps exist with your current technology and role/skills gaps to reach the desired future state

1. Map your current processes

Visualising your work is essential to successful process improvement. In a previous blog we have explained why it’s so important to understand your current state processes before you start making changes.

A business process can be defined as a series of related, structured activities performed by a group of people to achieve an organisational goal.
To visualise a process, think about the series of activities being performed by people from different functional groups across the organisation. One of the easiest ways to visualise this is using a swim-lane process map.

Three key elements you need to understand are:
• What are the main activities being completed?
• Who is responsible for completing each activity?
• What technology, if any, is being used to complete the activity?

How do you capture an accurate picture of the current process? You need to engage the people who actually do the work.
To give an idea of what we mean by ‘visualising’ your work, take a look at this example process for accounts payable:

2. Analyse where the problems exist

With a clear understanding of the current process, your next step is to spend some time analysing how things are working and capture a view of the current issues from each person’s perspective. This will assist you in knowing where to focus your change efforts.
After identifying the pain points from each person’s perspective the next step is to pinpoint the waste in the process. A simple way of doing this is to apply Lean thinking to each activity in the process.

How? Classify the activities as follows:
• Customer value add (CVA) – Everything a customer is willing to pay for.
• Business value add (BVA) – A step or change made to the product/service which is necessary for future or subsequent steps but is not noticed by the final customer.
• Non-value add (NVA) – Any activities that do not add value to your customers.

Learning to see waste in your process is one of the first and most fundamental skills that you need to develop. Use TIMWOODS to help classify the waste (non-value adding activities) in your processes. Are we talking about re-work, waiting for the customer, waiting for your colleague, over-processing?

Once you have a clear understanding of the waste, measure the cost involved in delivering these non-value adding activities to the customer. This helps you get laser focused on what needs to be changed.

3. Design your Future Process

Armed with a clear understanding of what needs to be changed or eliminated from your process, think about designing how things will work in the future.

Start by getting the relevant people in the room to consider how things could be done differently:
• What are the automation opportunities?
• Where can you reduce cost?
• How can you reduce the time it takes to deliver value to your customer?

A key part of designing your future state is to map out how things will work differently. Considering what you have learnt through your analysis, how is the process going to work in the future?
• What are the main activities that need to be completed?
• Who is responsible for completing each activity?
• What technology will be used to complete the activity?

The bonus of mapping a future state process is that it creates buy-in from staff. Because the process is typically more streamlined, it is easier for them to take a step back, breathe it in and digest. It also creates excitement about the future state, as staff can see that they won’t have to deal with all the current problems.

Remember – just because you’ve mapped your future state doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. You’ll undoubtedly have to make tweaks along the way. Some ideas you have may not be feasible. You may have to add or remove steps to cater for cost constraints or legislative requirements.

4. Evaluate the Gaps

Now you have developed your future state, how will you get there?
Evaluate the potential gaps:
• Will your current technology be sufficient to deliver on the proposed changes?
• What sort of training might be required for your people to run the new process?
• Will you need to hire new skills into the organisation to deliver the new process successfully?

Conclusion

All these elements will require a significant investment by your organisation. You are likely to have options that need to be evaluated and considered carefully, so understanding the return on investment of each option is going to be critical to gaining buy-in from the senior decision makers across your organisation.