Operational Excellence System: Business Process Maturity assessment

Operational excellence is an imperative philosophy of creating high performance oriented workplace through effective management of business and operational processes, people and technologies to attain long term sustainable growth and customer satisfaction.

It is achieved when every member of the organisation can see the flow of value to the customer, identify value gaps, close them and ensure its delivery in the form of products and services to the final client.

Organisations that commit to this phenomenon use superior methodologies such as Business Process Management, Shingo Model, Six Sigma, Lean Management, Kaizen, Kanban and 7S.

All of these methodologies have unique set of its core principles that are implemented to develop an effective operational system. In this week’s article, the focus is on Business Process Management.

Maturity Assessment is how organisations should measure their process key indicators and it should use to assess itself in terms of how effective it manages its business and operational processes.

The ultimate goal is to help the business to create a process excellence competency and use it to reach high performance levels better than its competitors. In a highly- competitive modern business environment it is no longer acceptable for organisations or businesses to operate without knowing, understanding and managing their business processes on a daily basis.

Organisations are regarded as systems and in all systems there are many processes interconnected and interdependent in a series of block chain or matrix used to produce the final products.

This is the reason why Operational Excellence and Six Sigma Professional Bodies around the world have classified business processes as one of the pillars of excellence.

Business Process Management ( BPM) is the art and science of overseeing how work is performed in an organisation using a set of practices, tools and techniques to sustain and improve effectiveness of processes in delivering consistent outcomes. Porter’s value chain elucidates the value chain concept by classifying processes into core processes, support processes and management processes. Core processes are important activities of the business that result in production of goods and services such as end- to- end product of loan application in banking industry or of excavating and refining diamonds in mining industry while support processes enhance the execution of core process such as procurement, accounting and sales processes.

In addition, to these, there are management processes which focus on providing organisational direction, rules and practices that are vital in fulfilling the core and support process.

All of these processes should be aligned to the business strategic direction for them to generate expected strategic value. Organisations that have persistent problems usually, do not manage their processes properly and that create variations ( mura) in processes leading to defects outputs.

To check the level of maturity of your organisation in managing its processes, focus should be on process activities, measurement, and level of ownership, interconnections and process change methods.

Many of the organisations’ problems originate from process activities that form the work systems, however, whenever there is a problem, organisations tend to resort to who to blame instead of diagnosing where the problem could be coming from in the existing business processes.

Managing processes start by proper planning where core, support and management processes are defined, mapped and documented and become standards of operations. For any organisation to produce exceptional results over time, these processes should have clear control systems, they should be monitored to eliminate waste, improve their cycle time, eliminate processes constraints like micro management and conflicting reporting lines delaying decision making.

Processes should be harmonised along the value chain. Special causes of variations should be identified and in most cases variations may come from ( muri) reworking of process activities which is a sign of ineffective use of productivity time.

Moreover, some processes have activities that do not contribute any value ( muda) to the final products and these activities increase the cycle time of production which is highly costly especially in a time where customers can easily switch to a better business due to long waiting time period.

Moreover, it is very important that owners of processes should demonstrate high accountability and responsibility in taking ownership of processes outcomes.

This means processes owners should find continual improvement opportunities on daily basis to improve the performance of their processes and both the process owners and suppliers should work coherently on improvement projects.

Errors that cause delay or defects in process results should be identified and resolved before they change into serious problems. This is a sign of process excellence orientation.

The Author is a member of African Excellence Forum, Holds Master of Science Degree in Strategic Management and is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organisational Excellence from America Society for Quality. Six Sigma Greenbelt, ISO 9001: 2015 Certified.