Almost all work of a company is faced to the future. Chiefs put aims and objectives and plan to achieve them in certain period. In conditions of competitiveness it is very important to improve value of goods or services in the eyes of customers. In order to use resources more effectively, the process approach is used in companies. Business processes are optimized, improved and managed.
Common mistakes when implementation of the process approach
- Aims of the process approach implementation are not defined
The process approach helps to use resources of a company more effectively, and, as a result, helps to enlarge value of a product (service) for a customer. In order to make everyone understand it, the aim should be described in plain language.
A correct description of the aim: to improve results of company work and to enlarge its effectiveness, having taken the following measures:
- Make a list of key processes and define responsible employees;
- Define inputs and outputs of processes and to build the sequence of them;
- Define resources consumed by each process;
- Describe the procedure of optimal business process implementation;
- Develop methods of process monitoring and effectiveness measurement.
- Excess specification of documents
If process description is too expanded, managers will study only their part of work and won’t have a distinct understanding on what should be in other areas of business. In this case, it will be hard to optimize business processes: it will be very hard to correct a big number of documents and to inform employees about them.
- Processes are not synchronized
It happens that an employee responsible for a business process has improved something in his area of responsibility, but has created difficulties in other areas of business. All changes and ways of business process optimization which are going to be used in a certain business process should be discussed with employees responsible for implementation of other business processes of a company.
- The procedure of making changes is not established
If an employee responsible for a business process wants to change something, he can meet with resistance of colleagues. In order to create conditions for continual improvements, company management should do the following:
- Create a position of a value stream manager which will coordinate work of all managers responsible for business processes;
- Create inter-process corporate groups including managers responsible for processes, a value stream manager and management of a company in order to discuss and solve key problems appearing in the flow.
- There is no system of process effectiveness evaluation
First of all, it’s better to define a list of indexes which will help to understand how optimal business processes are and how effectively a company works. On this base you can build the system of data gathering and the system of reporting which will be convenient for you.