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In our previous article we emphasised the customer/stakeholder focus of the business process approach to management. The first step is therefore clearly determining who those customers and stakeholders are. Who buys or uses your product or service offering? Who makes the buying decision? What exactly are they buying in terms of benefits? Who else is affected by your activities and what are their expectations? A small pharmaceutical manufacturer of multivitamins, antibiotics, syrups and OTC medicines for children, located in a large African city, was trying to answer these questions for their own organisation. They came up with the following.
Customer/Stakeholder and Benefits Sought
2.Determine the Value Chains that Deliver these Benefits All the benefits to the customers and other stakeholders are derivable from their product range, their distribution and market support and their information dissemination.
3. Decompose into Processes and Determine the Process Boundaries
Listing out the major processes in the value chain as we did in the previous step, is top-down. We might then take each major process identified and using the following procedure suggested by Patrick and McDermott, break them down into sub processes. In the case of the pharmaceutical for example, we might find, after going through this sequence that the sales and production process decomposes into the customer acquisition (identify prospect, qualify prospect and establish contract) and order fulfilment (receive order, produce and assemble order, and ship order) sub-processes.
4. Select Appropriate Metrics Based on Critical Success Factors for the Identified Processes and Overall Strategy Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected. Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity level.
Our pharmaceutical company chose to measure four categories. At the top level, the chosen metrics were:
5. Appoint Process Owners for Each Core Process The job of process owner is to manage the processes in the critical areas of improvement, boundary management, metrics, collaboration and advocacy. The process owner coordinates the functions and activities at all levels of the process, and has the authority and ability to makes changes to the process. He is responsible and accountable for its outcome.
6. Begin a Never Ending Cycle of Business Process Improvement Using process diagrams, value stream maps and metrics, determine the current capabilities of your core processes. Identify and quantify areas of greatest opportunity using information from customer surveys, comparison of your process performance with a similar ideal process, etc.
Continuous business process improvement is the subject of our next article. Be sure to watch out for it. |
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