Departments of Motor Vehicles around the globe are nightmares for people in every country. They will tell you horror stories about how they had to wait interminably for hours, how the DMV gave them the runaround while trying to get a new license or a driving license renewed. Getting your car checked for emissions and having it certified has its own volume of nightmarish stories. Buying or selling a car with transfer of title, getting new license plates all have their own dedicated chapters!

California Department of Motor Vehicles even around ten years ago used to a nightmare of nightmares. Because of the large population of drivers, cars and the size of the CA state, its DMV stood out as the worst example of processes run amuck!

Not anymore! In the last ten years, the California DMV has performed miracles through rationalization and the use of technology both in the home and spreading it through the other stakeholders like independent shops that check for emissions before the DMV can issue its annual renewal of the license plates!

You can accomplish a lot just sitting at home or at work, through their web site and the use of US Postal service! Your car is due for an actual emissions check only every other year. They send you a letter in the mail three months ahead of the expiry date. If your car does not need an emissions test, you can renew through their web site and pay for it with a credit card. You get your renewal stickers in the mail and you are done! They have reduced waste even to such an extent that you usually need two stickers - one that says July and another that says 2008. They only send out the year sticker, since you renew around the same time every year anyway!

If your car needs an emissions check, you take the notice to the Smog Check shop. They do the test and if you pass, they update the DMV computers automatically from their systems. You come home, and pay for it through the web site and you are done!

They have leveraged the Internet as much as they can for all kinds of services that they would otherwise need you to come and stand in line!

Don’t take my word for it! Here’s a funny blog entry about how some Californians are truly missing the bad experiences at the DMV!! There are many other California residents that agree on how much the DMV has improved here!

The California DMV may have a lot of lessons to teach even Corporations. The results speak for themselves! Well done!

Michael J. Hammer, the famous Management Guru, wrote this article - The Seven Deadly Sins of Performance Management and How To Avoid Them in the MIT Sloan Review in 2007. It’s written for the larger topic of Performance Measurement as in Financial or Sales Performance but is just as applicable to Process Performance Measurement also. His seven sins, and how I think they apply to Process Measurement:

1. Vanity - Using measures that look that particular organization look good. In a call center, using the Average Handle Time (AHT) metric is a classic example. Excellent AHT measurements may only apply to the Call Center but customers, and prospects may be unsatisfied with their interactions with the call center agents.

2. Provincialism: Organizational Boundaries - This happens often with localized Six Sigma or other process improvement efforts. What if you increased the Order Processing speed in the Order Processing Process. Does this cause orders to be backlogged in production? Suboptimization can happen a lot if an overall picture of the end to end process is not kept in mind.

3.Narcissm: Measuring things from the company’s point of view rather than the customers’. Excellent internal metrics without a Customer Satisfaction Score to balance out internal concerns, is a recipe for kidding ourselves!

4. Laziness: Not placing enough thought into a company’s stage in the industry, strategy and objectives when deciding on what is important to measure. Efficiency measures may be more appropriate for an established company with a huge customer base. Customer delight may be more important for an upstart company that is trying to grab market share.

5. Pettiness: Measuring only a small component of what is important. Many times, measuring some of the things, and not measuring some others, may make the department or function look better.

6. Inanity: Measurement itself produces consequences by way of employee behavior. If you place too much emphasis on Average Handle Time in a call center, and employees are compensated by how they perform on this metric, they will be hanging up the phone quickly just to make this metric look better.

7. Frivolity: Not being serious about measurement itself. Sometimes Process Measurement becomes important only in the context of outsourcing where you need to have some SLAs and measurements in the contract. Many organizations think it is important to measure only in those cases.

Michael J.Hammer gives us all something to think about seriously!

Sin is sweet in the beginning, but bitter in the end - The Talmud

The Toyota Production System (TPS) is much studied and emulated for use in other companies around the world. Unfortunately, many study the Toyota Production Systems’ Tools and Tactics such as the Kanban pull systems, cords, production cells, etc rather than the underlying principles!

Ran across this very interesting article published in 2004 in the Harvard Business Review - Learning to Lead at Toyota.

The author Steven J.Spear argues that the underlying principles of TPS are more useful to study, and emulate, rather than the Tools and Tactics. Could not be more useful for Process Improvement in Services! Let’s see how Stevn Spear’s principles apply to services:

1. There Is No Substitute For Direct Observation : Improvement of business processes is impossible without direct observation of how business processes are executed now, today, no matter what the Visio diagrams of the business processes say how they should be executed! Invariably,studying how business processes are being executed today is the only way to unearth process improvement possibilities. Currently, most process improvement efforts seem to be focused on measurements and improvement of Key Performance Indicators. They may miss a whole boatload of improvement opportuities related to elimination of waste in the process.That can be best done only with direct observation and lots of it.

2. Proposed Changes Should Always be Structured As Experiments: If you want to improve a business process, you can spend money on employee training, buying a new software package and implement it, or address the way the process itself moves forward, eliminating steps that are non-value adding, or speed up value adding steps. Now which of these may be the most effective for the time and money spent? Not all improvement efforts yield the same magnitude of improvement. Design of Experiments in Six Sigma practices have long offerred a very useful technique to effect improvements as experiments. These can be rolled back if they have unintended consequences or they don’t yield the expected results!

3.Workers and Managers Should Experiment As Frequently As Possible: In many Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma process improvement activities, the emphasis may be on a single consolidated effort in process improvement, as opposed to a committment to improve business processes constantly! TPS advocates standardization of a process and once it standardized, it emphasizes constant improvement! If that approach is used in business process improvement, you can get significantly better results. This underlying principle can make a lot of difference than specific tactics and tools that are used without experimentation first.

4. Managers Should Coach, Not Fix: This principle that has worked very well in Manufacturing and in the Toyota Production System is perhaps the least used one in business process improvement. Many process improvement activities are organized and conducted by management rarher than the people who do the work. Of course, manufacturing may be different somewhat from services where you may need to have an eye on the overall process flow and avoid any sub-optimization at a process step level. This principle is also a great way to ensure buy-in of the participants!

Good article and good principles to think about when thinking about continuous business process improvement!

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are. - Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Value Stream Mapping, very simply put, tries to eliminate Non-Value Adding activities while speeding up Value-Adding Activities. For example, in Manufacturing a Toy, attaching two pieces of the toy together is Value Adding while filling out a Production Floor Log is Non-Value adding. This is from the point of view of the end consumer, a child. The production floor log is value adding to the company but not to the end consumer. The child could not care less whether the log was filled out or not.

This works very well in Manufacturing. However while applying Value Stream Mapping to Services, two other aspects may come into play -1. Internal Financial or Security Controls and 2. Mandatory Legal Steps required. In a services setting - let’s say it’s an Accounts Payable process and the person is approving invoices to be paid. Invariably, companies have limits for who can approve what Invoices. If it is a $100 invoice, it may need only one level of approval, while if it is for $100,000, it may need five levels of approvals. Similarly, only system administrators in a company are allowed to create new user accounts. Security needs may dictate levels of approvals for this activity also. The Fair Credit Act in the U.S may dictate distinct steps to be followed before an overdue account can be turned over to a collection agency. If the person says on the phone that they need to consult an attorney then the company may need to follow up with a legal notice of some kind. If they don’t say that they may need to follow another set of steps legally.

In Manufacturing, many of these mandated non-value adding steps may not be that much of an intrusion into Value Stream Mapping and improvement of those processes. In Services, these activities may not be eliminated completely because the law requires you to do them diligently. You may deploy technology to speed these activities up, even if you cannot eliminate them. Deploying methods such as sending a notice by Email may be legally acceptable, instead of paper snail mail.

Services are somewhat different from Manufacturing, but appropriate adaptation of Value Stream Mapping methods may produce similarly excellent resulsts!

The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water moulds itself to the pitcher - Chinese Proverb

Paul Harmon of Business Process Trends writes a very interesting column - BPM in Europe - about the differences he sees between Europe and the US, when it comes to adoption and use of Business Process Management approaches, tools, and techniques.

Paul observes that Europe is probably more advanced in its use of workflow automation software and hence Business Process Management as a disciplined technical approach seems to be more mature there, than in the U.S.

He also observes that among technology consulting firms, use of BPMS tools is more pronounced in Europe than the U.S. He observes that in the U.S, a lot more companies are engaged in Organizational Information Architecture than in Europe.

However, interest in Business Process Management as a priority within companies is equal in the U.S and Europe.

My guess is that use of information technology may have a longer history in the U.S than Europe. Consequently, there are many more islands of systems that do their own thing. Tying them all into a cohesive Business Process Flow Orchestration may involve retrofitting the older IT systems with technologies like Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) before BPMS solutions can be applied to tie them all together in the context of end-to-end business processes. This is where they may be doing a lot of Enterprise Architectural work on the existing Information Systems.

One of the more interesting observations Paul has about U.S companies is that they are more experimental in nature, switching over to new, untried approachees, while Europe may be more deliberative before adoption of new technologies. This is a double edged sword. Unless somebody tries these new approaches out, they may not be able to see the problems with them and fix them! Seems like sometimes US companies may be the guinea pigs for new approaches and technologies.

Interesting set of observations that could help both parties on both sides of the pond!

Our greatest strength as a human race is our ability to acknowledge our differences, our greatest weakness is our failure to embrace them. - Judith Henderson