Business Process Involvement is concerned with the practice of the identification, analysis, and improvement of current business practices in order to be able to meet best practice standards and optimize processes, or just to help with the overall improvement of quality and the user experience.
Business Process Improvement is known by a number of other names including the likes of business process management, continual improvement process, business process reengineering, and just process improvement. They are all however fundamentally concerned with reducing errors, minimizing waste, streamlining efficiency, and improving productivity.
Business Process
The business process simply refers to the series of tasks that need to be repeatedly performed for the creation of a service or product that is aimed at customers, sponsors or stakeholders. A flowchart is one good example of a model of a business process, detailing the tasks required to reach the ultimate goal.
Business processes begin with that objective in mind and only end when that goal has actually been achieved, and value has been provided to the customer. These processes can often be split into smaller ones in order to allow for the required labor to be divided between team members.
Three are general types of business processes – operational, management, and support.
Operational is concerned with the core business and provides a value stream including customer orders, manufacturing, and the opening of accounts, and so on.
Management includes processes such as budget and employee oversight and corporate governance.
Supporting processes include those processes that are concerned with giving support to other processes including accounting, technical support, and recruitment.
The execution of Business Process Improvement
There are a number of different methods that can be used for the purpose of helping an organization to carry out the execution of Business Process Improvement. The aim of these methods is to help a business to identify and resolve process issues and to then analyze whether those changes were a success or a failure.
Each method will suit different needs even with that common goal, with a number of frameworks focusing on techniques for lean process improvement and others on improving company culture. There are also some methods that assist companies with the visual mapping out of process workflows.
The streamlining of business processes will result in fewer delays and mistakes and an improvement in customer satisfaction. Areas that need to be improved can be identified by carrying out a process audit in order to discover any lurking issues or risks.
Once it is clear which process parts are in need of improvement, the next step is to carry out a comprehensive analysis to develop a full understanding of the problems and how they can be fixed.
Tough questions may need to be asked, such as where the roadblocks are being created, why have costs and resources unduly increased, where is the most time being wasted, and has quality been impacted.
Once those issues have been identified and analyzed, the inadequate aspects of the business process will need to be redesigned and improved to increase efficiency.
