Think "Business Processes" Not "Departments" - 5 Compelling ReasonsLearn Management Articles on management-info.biz. Think "Business Processes" Not "Departments" - 5 Compelling Reasons article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
A business process is a collection of interrelated work tasks triggered by an event and geared towards providing results or outcomes valued by the 'customer'. The adoption of process thinking causes an organisation to align its activities and systems with the natural flow of materials and information from the start to the end of the value chain. Functional thinking creates silos with boundaries across which information and other resource flows are not seamless, leading to the absence of a shared understanding of what the business is about, what factors are critical to the achievement of objectives and how efforts can be coordinated to best attain those objectives. Carry out an experiment in your organisation. Take any core process: ask five managers in different departments involved in the process the following questions.
* Describe this process If yours is a functionally oriented organisation, their answers, where they understand your questions at all, are likely to be all different. Some processes you might consider are order processing, product development, recruitment etc. 2. Business Process Thinking focuses the organisation on customer needs Because of the insistence on definite identifiable outcomes valued by the customer, process thinking helps the organisation focus on correctly identifying and satisfactorily meeting and exceeding their expectations. Measures of performance are tied to current customer satisfaction levels as well as the enhancement of capacity to satisfy the customer in the future. Departmental or functional thinking is, on the other hand, focused on internal measures of no value to the customer. Examples of the different kinds of measures are input measures (e.g. items delivered by suppliers), process measures (e.g. cost, time, involvement, efficiency) and output (e.g. timeliness, quality, ease of use, returns on investment) measures. Decisions on appropriate measures must meet the dual requirements of value to the customer and improvability. 3. Business Process Thinking Encourages Focus on Value Addition Organisations that have adopted a business process mentality constantly strive to ensure that certainly all their processes, and as much as possible, all activities within those processes contribute towards the final outcome paid for by the customer. All non-value adding processes and activities are eliminated or minimised. Many functionally oriented organisations for example have lengthy approval requirements that serve no purpose. A company drastically collapsed its approval chain after an experiment in which unsuspecting approvers failed to detect that the documents they had just endorsed only had the usual cover sheet followed by a sheaf of blank sheets. This meant they were approving requests without reading the contents! Talk about non-value addition! Consider also that in many processes the actual contact time between a process document or work piece and the workers or process operators is usually a ridiculously small fraction of the process cycle time. The balance of the time is wasted on such non-value activities as waiting, unnecessary movement, locating misplaced items or documents etc. 4. Business Process Thinking Encourages a Focus on Quality The bane of good quality products or services in majority of organisations is the variation or inconsistency of process outcomes. Organisations with a process mentality continuously ferret out and eliminate sources of variation to achieve consistent results. This is almost impossible to achieve within functionally oriented organisations as their narrow focus prevents awareness of the causes of problems that span functional boundaries. While a functional organisation might call for an arbitrary amount of improvement in quality (e.g. 10% reduction in defects) process oriented organisations apply a fact-based understanding of the relationship between results and the processes that drive them. Statistical tools are used to study what factors have the most significant impact and effort is focused on influencing these factors. 5. Business Process Thinking Institutionalises High Performance and Guarantees Execution of Organisational Priorities A focus on business processes institutionalises high performance in the following ways.
* Uses measures of performance that are meaningful to the customer and other stakeholders. This is very important in view of the axiom that what gets measured gets done. Rewards are aligned to measures, which in turn support valued customer and organisational outcomes.
|
More Articles:1. Resistance - How to Handle It By Alan Fairweather Do you ever meet with resistance from other people - I bet you do! It might be a customer, a colleague, a member of your team or even someone in your personal life. Dealing with resistance or objections is one of the biggest challenges faced by business people; so let's consider why we get resistance and how we can handle it. I'm going to talk about customer contacts but the same rules apply whether it's a colleague or even someone in your personal life.Well there's good news and bad news - fi… 2. Increasing the Return on Your Training Investment By Kevin Eikenberry Insightful leaders and organizations recognize that training is a valuable tool for personal and professional development and therefore set some sort of an annual training budget.Most everyone I’ve ever talked to has been to both excellent training (hopefully ours!) and training that was, well, not so good. In a perfect world we could connect the best training experiences with the best application back in the workplace. This would make the equation easy – pick great training, insuring that pe… 3. Running Successful Meetings - The Key Steps To Getting It Right By Peter Fisher We all complain about meetings which are a waste of our time and the truth of the matter is that so many are exactly that. We've also seen the "corridor" meeting that takes place afterwards where it seems the real decisions are taken, or the agreed decisions are overturned.You'll get your chance at some point in your career to run your own meeting - is yours going to go the same way? or will you make sure it's effective and does the job it is supposed to?Well run meetings contribute to team bu… 4. Firewords: A Dangerous necessity in your life? There are many stories of people injuring themselves, and others, with Firewords in the old wild days of entrepreneurship and it is usually passed off as the price that had to be paid in order to win. However, as time passes, there is a tendency to confuse reality with myth about how people rose to be so successful. The myth tends to appear as reality and that can be dangerous especially as we are all becoming more aware of our rights and the speed of the internet and bloggers to highlight indis… |
||||
