Information Availability is half the battle in Business Process Improvement!

First, it is the availability of information itself, in a central, easily accessible way, that can speed up Business Processes by an order of maginitude!

Measurement and reporting of Performance Measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) themselves help Business Process Improvement. In many cases, these performance measure information is not readily available for actionable improvement efforts.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the extensive use of the Internet to stitch together, many different systems within the same company, as well as systems of suppliers, and service providers, have bridged the Information Availability Gap to a large extent. If organizations have not done this as yet, it is well worth looking into.

Lean Six Sigma and other Process Improvement practitioners often overlook the availability of information itself to speed up, eliminate, do in parallel, many of the steps in a business process. Instead of a sequential approach to two steps in a process, may be one person can do both of them in one single step, if information needed to do it is available easily. In some cases, approvals for some action can be taken immediately and the end user served by default. If subsequent analysis of the information reveals adverse information, the decisions can be undone. In some countries, they assume that Applicants for a Passport do not have adverse information in their background checks. Their applications are approved by default. If anything adverse comes up in a follow up analysis, the passport is revoked! This way 99% of the citizens who have a clean security record are not delayed by Police or Security checks for handling the other 1% properly!

Information Availability, especially when it comes to Performance Measures or KPIs, is indeed a problem in many business processes. Information systems such as ERP systems evolved, and developed to automate functional areas like Finace, Marketing, Sales, Manufaturing, Warehousing and Logistics. They were not designed with end-to-end business processes like Order-To-Cash processes in mind. Consequently, many of them don’t even capture timestamps with great detail if you want to analyze Turn-Around Time (TAT) metrics! Databases just record at the most, the date and time when a table was modfied, and not any more details on the action was just performed. In practical terms, it becomes somewhat impossible to get information about TAT metrics in business processes! Information Availability about Performance Measures is not to be taken lightly. Efforts to improve this aids Process Improvement.

Information Availability is not very high on Process Excellence folks’ aganda. That may precisely be the first thing to explore if you want to get a lot of mileage out of your own improvement efforts!

Information about the package is as important as the package itself. - Fred Smith, CEO, Fedex

The funny thing about Process Improvement, whether Six Sigma or Lean, is that not all Process Improvement efforts are equal to others.

Some are "More Equal" than others!

Efforts needed for different Process Improvement ideas may not be linearly proportional to their payoffs. Before jumping into Kaizen activities, it may be worthwhile to prioritize efforts with respect to effort needed vs payoffs.

Sometimes a simple, almost "effortless" improvement effort may lead to a disproportionate payoff while a very expensive improvement may result in a not so impressive payoff.

In processes, especially when it involves the public, delays in service cause more dissatisfaction than the actual services themselves. Everyone hates waiting. In as much as waiting can be eliminated in business processes, customer satisfaction metric registers increases.

Analysis and eliminating delays in business processes, invariably leads to better service and disproportionate payoffs. Funny thing is that some of these payoffs show up as better word-of-mouth recommendations and additional business; something not immediately recognizable and acknowledgeable.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results - Winston Churchill

Whether it is the Factory Floor, or a Customer Service or Support Center, helping customers with their orders or help regarding anything, the amount of time wasted looking for things is amazing! Any lean improvement project has to look at this waste and come up with ways to eliminate them. This can cut a big chunk out of the costs of operation.

On the factory floor, there are techniques like the 5S Methodology that will reorganize tools and other materials used on the factory floor so that no time is wasted looking for them. These can be organizing tools where we may need them, drawing shapes of the tools on the board where it is stored so that you can get the tool back to where it needs to be after doing the work.

On the software side, many creative techniques can be used to realize more or less, the same kinds of waste reduction. In software systems, a lot of time is wasted looking for a customer, an order or a document regarding an insurance policy, premium or claim. Many, many different ways of locating the information you need in your own software systems could be provided so that you can locate these things you are looking for quickly.

Partial field values, common spelling mistakes could all be supported in the software system. If you are searching for "Peterson", allowing for searches for "Pete", "Peter". "Pieter" pulling up the record for "Peterson" along with others could help the agent quickly locate the customer, order or other things the agent is looking for quickly.

Fifteen years ago, term indexing and search technology was not mature enough for these kinds of searches to be implemented in software easily without every company developing these components from scratch. These days there are many indexing and search software packages that can be incorporated into your own software that there is no excuse for not including them in comprehensive ways. These kinds of insights are rarely talked about during Requirements Gathering phases of such software development but they should be!

Reduction of wasted time is a great opportunity for Business Process Outsourcing services providers. They are always looking for Business Transformation possibilities while they take up responsibility for delivering a Business Process as a service. Since many of them are also IT vendors in addition to being IT-Enabled Services (ITES), this is a great win-win on all sides by making the BPO payoff with associated IT projects also!

There is Gold in them Thar Business Processes. You can get to it by eliminating wasted time looking for things!

You’re searching, Joe, for things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings -- there are no such things. There are only middles - Robert Frost

Process Improvement has never been more important or more needed during tough times. The kicker may be the lack of funds to take up new efforts at this time when budgets are pared to the bone. However, surveys of Fortune 500 CIOs the past few years have shown Business Process Improvement to be the #1 priority for the majority of them! Hope they still mean i, for their own sakes!

Process Improvement that leads to cost cutting has a very attractive value proposition at this time and could be taken up in earnest by many companies. Cutting out waste in effort and time leads to less resources being needed to accomplish the same quantum of tasks, and that’s a very compelling thing to sell during these tough times.

Process Improvement has never been more important to Outsourcing and Offshoring service providers than at this time. Many companies are renegotiating their contracts with their service providers because of the recession. In some cases, they are asking for a Per Transaction pricing rather than a Full Time Equivalent (FTE) kind of contract pricing.

Service providers, especially offshore providers have thrown people at the problem to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in contracts. Now that the topline rates are negotiated down and the margins are shrinking, they may have to pay close attention to every employee’s efficiency and effectiveness and cannot afford to have more people than needed. When contracts are based on per transaction pricing, the pressure to make sure that every efficiency and effectiveness goal of every employee is met is even more pronounced.

Process Improvement has a very compelling need in tough times. Unfortunately, they may not ne taken up because of blanket bans on any new expenditures! Sad, but true in most companies!

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. - Steve Jobs

There are many Unmeasurables in Business Processes such as Customer Support Effectiveness, Customer Satisfaction, Service Excellence, etc. However, State of the Art in Business Process Measurement and Analysis is that many of these Subjective Factors are converted into some sort of Objective Scores.

For example, Customer Satisfaction Index (CSAT) may be on a scale of 1 to 10. For example, if a customer sends flowers to the CEO with a thank-you note, it may be a 10. If the customer sends a nasty note saying that they are terribly unsatisfied and will let everyone that they know about the poor service they got, may be a safe 1!

This is where sometimes, capturing Subjective Performance Information in the form of open ended text may convey more meaning than reducing everything to numbers and averaging them up and down. For example, outliiers, both positive and negative may need to flagged, counted and descriptions strored and readily made available! Analyzing these pieces of information and making effective use of them falls in the realm of art rather than a science!

If there were five positive outliers and five negative outliers, it may be worthwhile for the Process Folks to keep tab of the descriptions of what made these positive and negative outliers are and not assume that on whole, things are hunky-dory! The detailed open eneded information may be much more valuable to the organization than numbers themselves. Would the negative outliers be so negative that word of mouth from those can kill anything positive that may come out of the organization?

While what cannot be measured cannot be managed well, sometimes we may have to pay attention to Intangibles and accept them as intangibles, pay attention to them and get some useful actions out of them! This is especially useful in companies like Pharmaceutical companies where beyond a certain number of negative outliers, like side effects of drugs, the issue quickly escalates from statistical outliers to a full-blown crisis in no time, ironically, whether it is warranted or not! Perception overtakes reality!

Intangible factors may mean very good things or very harmful things, depending upon what they are, which industry you are in, what your products or services are. Unmeasurables can be quite tricky and may need to be handled better than measurables, sometimes!

There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters. - Natalie Clifford Barney