Are you determined to keep up with the accelerated development and diversification of consumer needs? In today’s digital economy, digital transformation is essential to keep up with the change that is unfolding at a rapid, non-linear pace. Thus, it becomes of utmost importance for your organization to adopt continual process improvement, which can help minimize errors, reduce waste, improve productivity, and streamline efficiency.
Well, that’s why businesses came up with the idea to make process improvement part of everyday conversation. Organizations are changing the way they capture, share, and review their business processes. In this article, you will see all about process improvement and how it can benefit your business.
What is Process Improvement, and how can it help your business?
Process improvement is an approach that involves the practice of identifying, analyzing, and improving existing business processes to optimize performance and accelerate innovation. Process improvement directly impacts your business growth by streamlining the processes across the enterprise to meet the ever-changing customer expectations. A well-defined process improvement approach can bring agility to adapt to future scalability and customer needs.
Continuous process improvement methodology
Continuous process improvement is called the approach of making incremental changes to the process model to improve efficiency and quality of outcomes.
To understand the continuous process improvement methodology, the idea is to analyze current processes and identify the gaps/areas of improvement. The identified gap is then fixed via improvement in the existing process by implementing the change. Once the solution is standardized, you analyze the existing process to identify further gaps and set future targets.
What are the stages of process improvement?
Here are the stages of implementing a plan for process improvement
Figure 1 Continuous Process Improvement
1. Discover the current state of a process
It’s critical to understand the as-is state of a process before you begin to improve a process. Discovering and mapping the current state of the process can help you identify the step-causing bottlenecks. Enterprises can start with visualizing the workflow by creating a flowchart or can automatically discover processes by using process discovery and mining tools.
2. Assess and analyze
After outlining the process, it’s time to analyze each step in detail. What are the bottlenecks? Which step is causing a delay? Identify the steps with frequent issues. Process mining tools allow enterprises to monitor and analyze process and activity level KPIs and enable them to identify activities causing bottlenecks with visual heatmaps and reports.
3. Re-engineer and optimize the process
After analyzing potential bottlenecks, optimize the process using simulation tools that can help you run processes for real-world business scenarios and compare the multiple scenarios to identify the best process for deployment. This also enables organizations to identify repetitive and mundane steps and where RPA bots could be deployed for improved business outcomes.
4.Implement the improved process
In order to put the new optimized process in place, communicate the improved process plan to all teams and roles responsible for executing it and impart the required skill set to make them understand the newly defined process and their roles.
5. Monitor and Control
Continuous monitoring of your processes will help ensure they stay efficient. Organizations can leverage tools that provide system-based recommendations on incoming workload to control the process outcome and never miss to achieve future targets.
