A common approach at the start of an ERP requirements or business process improvement project is to interview process owners to ask them how the current processes could be enhanced.
What is Business Process Improvement?
Our business process improvement services focus in the first instance on the identification of opportunities for improvement in current processes. A common approach at the start of an ERP requirements or business process improvement project is to interview process stakeholders to ask them how the current processes could be enhanced. While this is sometimes a valuable exercise, it has a serious flaw in that it assumes that process owners will be able to identify business process improvement opportunities. Many process owners have limited experience of seeing how similar processes operate in other organisations and often complain that they “don’t know what good looks like”.
How Can Lumenia Help?
We have addressed this issue by building a library of over 400 sample business process improvement enablers. These are presented in descriptive form to client process stakeholders using a web-based application, where users are asked to identify whether each enabler is being used in current processes in full, partly or not at all.
Each instance where an enabler is not being fully utilised represents an opportunity for improvement. Using the stakeholder responses, we can benchmark client business processes externally, using our experience of hundreds of previous projects. For multi-site organisations, this approach can also be used to compare performance of different entities or sites within the business. High performing sites can then be used as an exemplar when considering improvement opportunities. Set up a call with a senior consultant to learn more about our approach and how we can help to identify opportunities for business process improvement quickly and efficiently.
Benefits of our Approach to Business Process Improvement
Efficient Opportunity Identification
Our process enabler library and web-based tool allow for very effective and efficient use of stakeholder time. It typically takes less the 45 minutes for a process stakeholder to provide feedback on the enablers. By taking feedback from a wide range of stakeholders we can build a rich picture of current process capability very efficiently.
No Dependency On Existing Knowledge
Because our approach uses examples of good practice business process enablement, the prior experience of process stakeholders to “what good looks like” is not a factor. This removes one the most significant impediments to identifying new, more effective ways of working.
Learn From Proven Process Innovation
The exercise of working through the enablers is often in itself a positive learning experience for many process owners. Seeing examples allows stakeholders to think about how the enablers might apply in their own business process scenarios and to benefit from proven process innovations.
Low Resource Requirement
Our approach needs relatively little time commitment from individual process stakeholders. Also, because the opportunity identification exercise is web-based, there is no requirement for travel or for co-ordination of diaries to allow for physical meetings at this point in a process improvement project.
