Organizations, big and small, across the business world need to constantly improve their business processes spanning across various business groups and functional areas. The purpose is to continuously improvise the way business is conducted so that business operations become more and more effective and efficient.
Business Processes
Business processes are everywhere in an organization - in marketing (launching a new advertisement, carrying out a market survey), sales (signing a contract, preparing a proposal), operations (delivering the product/services, developing a new offering), human resources (hiring a candidate, running employee engagement and satisfaction programs), finance (generating an invoice, filing taxes), administration (coordinating employee transportation, preventive maintenance of facilities), purchase (procuring supplies, handling customs), quality (handling process change requests, guiding improvement initiatives).
Process Excellence
Since business processes play an important role in the eventual success of the organization the upkeep, maintenance and improvement of business processes is very important. Moreover, business needs and constraints are dynamic and hence business processes need to be changed to keep them aligned with the changed business realities. Even if business realities do not undergo significant changes, performance expectations from business processes keep on increasing gradually. This sets the stage for process excellence to come into play.
Process excellence essentially dwells upon the approach and methods used by an organization to keep its business processes aligned with changing business needs and to constantly improve and improvise them to ensure business operations are effective and efficient in serving the customers in the best possible manner. It is important to note that only selected business processes will be customer-interfacing however the customer-interfacing business processes are tightly coupled with and heavily depend on the internal processes in ensuring the overall system works seamlessly and as intended.
Leveraging Lean and Six Sigma
The successful adoption of Lean and Six Sigma in the recent decades is a testimony to two facts - first, process excellence is an important lever for organizations to improve their performance and second, Lean and Six Sigma offer tools and techniques that when used in an appropriate manner contribute towards process excellence.
Lean and Six Sigma and the combined approach, Lean Six Sigma, can be applied to any business process in any situation. The trick is to be able to correctly identify the target process (which is being studied for improvement) and identify the CTXs (where X could be Quality, Cost, Customer, Business, etc.). Thereafter it is easy, selecting a certain CTX to take for further investigation, computing its current performance (UCL/CL/LCL) and determining the sigma level using the desired performance (USL/Target/LSL) will generally reveal the problem statement as a natural end consequence.
Six Sigma DMAIC and DFSS approach provide a comprehensive framework to plan and perform projects for improving an existing product/service/process and for developing a new product/service/process. DMAIC or DFSS as the underlying approach and thoughtful integrated use of typical Six Sigma tools (MSA, RPN, SIPOC, Pareto) and typical Lean tools (like VSM, 5S, Kaizen, Kanban, Poka-yoke, Ishikawa Diagram, Jidoka, JIT) are very helpful in any improvement project. For process improvement, DMAIC approach can be used with appropriate Lean Tools being applied at various stages right throughout the DMAIC cycle.
Business Processes
Business processes are everywhere in an organization - in marketing (launching a new advertisement, carrying out a market survey), sales (signing a contract, preparing a proposal), operations (delivering the product/services, developing a new offering), human resources (hiring a candidate, running employee engagement and satisfaction programs), finance (generating an invoice, filing taxes), administration (coordinating employee transportation, preventive maintenance of facilities), purchase (procuring supplies, handling customs), quality (handling process change requests, guiding improvement initiatives).
Process Excellence
Since business processes play an important role in the eventual success of the organization the upkeep, maintenance and improvement of business processes is very important. Moreover, business needs and constraints are dynamic and hence business processes need to be changed to keep them aligned with the changed business realities. Even if business realities do not undergo significant changes, performance expectations from business processes keep on increasing gradually. This sets the stage for process excellence to come into play.
Process excellence essentially dwells upon the approach and methods used by an organization to keep its business processes aligned with changing business needs and to constantly improve and improvise them to ensure business operations are effective and efficient in serving the customers in the best possible manner. It is important to note that only selected business processes will be customer-interfacing however the customer-interfacing business processes are tightly coupled with and heavily depend on the internal processes in ensuring the overall system works seamlessly and as intended.
Leveraging Lean and Six Sigma
The successful adoption of Lean and Six Sigma in the recent decades is a testimony to two facts - first, process excellence is an important lever for organizations to improve their performance and second, Lean and Six Sigma offer tools and techniques that when used in an appropriate manner contribute towards process excellence.
Lean and Six Sigma and the combined approach, Lean Six Sigma, can be applied to any business process in any situation. The trick is to be able to correctly identify the target process (which is being studied for improvement) and identify the CTXs (where X could be Quality, Cost, Customer, Business, etc.). Thereafter it is easy, selecting a certain CTX to take for further investigation, computing its current performance (UCL/CL/LCL) and determining the sigma level using the desired performance (USL/Target/LSL) will generally reveal the problem statement as a natural end consequence.
Six Sigma DMAIC and DFSS approach provide a comprehensive framework to plan and perform projects for improving an existing product/service/process and for developing a new product/service/process. DMAIC or DFSS as the underlying approach and thoughtful integrated use of typical Six Sigma tools (MSA, RPN, SIPOC, Pareto) and typical Lean tools (like VSM, 5S, Kaizen, Kanban, Poka-yoke, Ishikawa Diagram, Jidoka, JIT) are very helpful in any improvement project. For process improvement, DMAIC approach can be used with appropriate Lean Tools being applied at various stages right throughout the DMAIC cycle.
