COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
What is business process?
Every business is operating with collective activities or steps or works in a defined manner to achieve their goal called business process. Business process always have inputs, and will use their resources in order to get a specific outputs for their target customers or market. Outputs could be a product or a service. Every business follows their own industry standard of order of work or activities to run their business process effectively and efficiently.
Need of business process improvement:
Business process improvement is an inevitable procedure in order stay in the market or business or both. Regardless of type of business you do or type of company you have or type of industry you own, we need to implement systematic process improvements periodically to stay in business. The rapid change of business market and customer’s needs, the business process must be improved to the change.
Understand the current process and measure current state:
Defining right goal and vision by understanding the current process is essential for successful process improvement. Studying the current business process and collecting required data is crucial for finding problems in current process which will give us an idea of what goal or objectives we opt to succeed. Statistical analysis techniques are suitable for measuring current state of business. Understanding this current business process and state is important for defining a better goal to achieve.
Choosing the right methodology for process improvement:
There are number of process improvement methodologies are available. These includes Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Re – Engineering, Agile Management, Design of Experiment, Process Excellence and so on. Business consulting firms claims that one of those are the best for business process improvement. Choosing right type of methodology is often depends on type of organization and the circumstances.
The TQM and Six Sigma having the proven record of successful business process improvement from the date back 1980’s till now. The TQM is an oldest and consists of management philosophies. The main focus of TQM is to eliminate variations by forcing process to adhere to an internal standards. There are 4 main areas in an organizations were TQM philosophy play its vital role (Mark Gershon, 2017).
- Managerial responsibility for continuous improvement.
- Focus on work process to achieve improvements.
- Use of statistics to measure process performance.
- Employee involvement and empowerment.
Six Sigma is another powerful methodology is highly suitable to many organizations for process improvements. Pyzdek (2003) defines six sigma as “a rigorous, focused and highly effective implementation of proven quality principles and techniques. It aims for error free business performance and it mainly focusing on improving the business process by reducing or eliminating defects in the current process. Six Sigma follows DMAIC methodology to improve the business process.
Conclusion:
Assessing the barriers and risk involved in process improvement will help any organization for a good start of implementation. Some studies suggest that combination of two approaches may help to get the fastest result. Proper learning, strong leadership and expert advice will help organizations to choose correct methodology for process improvement.
