A Simple Approach to Improve a Business Process

The Five Steps for Improving Processes:
1. Define:
•What are your customers saying about your product or service? (Quality, Cost, Delivery)
•Complete a Project Charter:
–Project information: Pick a team leader, a team mentor, and a start and end date for the project
–Team Members: Pick five to six team members making sure the membership is cross functional
–Process Start/Stop: Where does the process (to be improved) start and stop?
–Process Importance: Why is this process important to your business?
–Process Improvement Opportunities: What needs to improve? This may come from your customer or from within your organization
–Process Goals: What are your goals for this process? What do you want to achieve in the project?
–Process Measurements: How will you know if you reached the goals? How will you track progress?
–Project time frame: List the key steps of your project with dates. Make sure the dates fit within the start and end dates for the project.

2. Measure:
•Understand the process as it exists today. You are painting a “before picture”
•Techniques:
–Time it
–Videotape it
–Talk to the people that work within it
•Create a SIPOC Diagram of the Process:
–S (Suppliers): Who supplies each input?
–I (Inputs): What are the key inputs for this process? These are the ingredients needed to make the process happen.
–P(Process): Write out the general steps of the process. Look at the process from a satellite view. This is the recipe for the output
–O (Output): What are the key outputs of the process? These are what the customer is paying for. For each output, list the key metric. Collect data for the metric to understand how the output has performed.
–C (Customer): List your customers. You have external customers (those that pay you for your product and/or service) and internal customers (internal departments that receive output from this process)
-Collect performance data for each area of the SIPOC diagram

3. Analyze:
•Once you have measured the process and understand how it is performing, analyze the process to understand the specific areas that need to be improved
•Techniques
–Watch the videotape and critique it
–Brainstorming
–Nominal Technique
–Fishbone diagram
•Write out a statement of the opportunity for improvement. What needs to be improved or fixed?

4. Improve
•Once you are clear on what needs to improve or be fixed, take actions to improve the process. Use the plan/do/check/act cycle to implement the improvement action(s).
•Each action should have a responsible person and a due date
•Once the actions are taken, paint a before and after picture of the process. What did it look like before the improvement and what does it look like after the improvements? Use data as much as possible.

5. Control
•Once you make the improvements, make sure the improvements work and that they stay in place.
•Techniques:
–Change standard operating procedures
–Audit the process (periodically check on it)
–Measure and track the key outputs to make sure their performance stays in control
–Go through a lessons learned process. What went right in this project? What went wrong?
-Implement statistical process control, if applicable