Like ripping off an old band aid – pain needs to be sharp and short. Your business processes must change as your organization grows. The best time for a process re-design is during enterprise application system implementation when circumstances are right for everyone to accept the changes.
Mergers, spinoffs, new product lines, re-org of departments all beg the need for aligning work processes to the changed environment. Your company then progressively gets in a bind. In order to realize full efficiencies, it needs to re-design business processes but in doing so creates an overwhelming risk to disrupting design to manufacturing activities that can be threatening to the survival of the company and executive careers.
An enterprise system update offers a chance to make a bigger impact. Process re-design involves keeping or adding value-added activities and removing non-value steps. But what is value-added? It’s any process step that:
- Reduces time
- Reduces cost
- Improves quality
- Improves operations and service
Business process value may fall into two broad goals of efficiency and control. Control goals may enforce objectives such as quality, risk, regulation, traceability and accountability in order to manage and track that process. Efficiency goals are targeted to improve the speed of execution.
Compliance with FDA controls may outweigh time to market for Class 3 medical devices, as regulation is a show stopper. Conversely, for high-tech consumer electronics, faster market entry might be more valuable.
The first step in process re-design is to define goals through an internal exercise with management, product development, and manufacturing. These well-understood goals must be agreed upon and mapped to affected processes and people involved in the re-design.
Mapping the exiting targeted business processes will make you see the overall present state and help in identifying the improvement opportunities. Suggested mapping the process flows into three levels are as follows:
Enterprise Level
High level department or product development phase level processes. This involves senior management that can outline the overall corporate level business processes. This is captured in a block level process flow of major blocks of activity.
Process Level
Individual business process composed of multiple participants for a specific set of related deliverables. This can be described by process owners captured in a participant and department swim-lane diagram.
Activity Level
Each activity or decision in an individual process is listed. This is explained by task owners and captured in a pre-condition, activity, post condition list against the process step.
The set of diagrams and lists from the mapping workshops should capture the present state for analysis on elements to change to implement the goals.
Good heuristics to re-design process level activities are to:
- Move responsibility upstream, update the RACI for the flow steps
- Decision routed to the correct owners
- Decisions makers get the right information
- Remove activities that add no value to the objectives
- Add activities that are required or needed for regulation
- Add steps to collect KPI/metrics
- Sequential activities should occur concurrently if resources permit
- Collapse multiple steps be into one if possible
You update the process diagrams, get feedback from participants, but stay focused on executive goals. While line personnel emphasize tactical issues, these shouldn’t overshadow the redesign’s purpose. Consider tactical issues but keep focus on key goals. Eventually, you’ll develop a flow acceptable to leadership and line staff that meets most objectives. Then, you’re ready for system implementation.