Implementing a Business Process Improvement(BPI)

Implementing Business Process Improvements is like fine-tuning your car. You analyse its current state, identify the improvement areas, and then redesign/analyse and optimise it.

Formally stated Business Process Improvement(BPI) is a management exercise in which organisation leaders use various methodologies to analyse their processes/procedures to identify areas where they can improve accuracy, effectiveness and/or efficiency and then redesign those processes to realise the improvements. Business process improvement, or BPI, works by recognising the operations or employee skills that could be improved to facilitate smoother processes, more efficient workflow and across-the-board business growth.?

But why do we have to fine-tune the car? What is the intent of a BPI Initiative?

We can answer this question in four parts -

• Decrease Process Completion Time?– Discovering ways of carrying out the process faster or more efficiently. There are a lot of alternative ways this could be done, from annihilating inefficacious steps to embracing novel technology.
• Enhance Output Quality?– Concocting a better product with the same infusion of resources. This usually means finding steps within the process that negatively influence the end-product, resulting in imperfections and errors.
• Pinpoint WASTE?– Locating wasteful processes & slicing them out of the workflow. This may either help achieve the first 2 purposes or simply just improve comprehensive productivity. If your team doesn’t have to do unproductive work, they can disburse more time on the work that generates value for the company.
• Ease in meeting Customer Demands?- With the improved product grade and reduced process friction, you can meet the client deliverables much more efficiently and effectively.

How to carry out a BPI Initiative?

STEP 1 - MAPPING

Start with laying down all the business processes/subprocesses that you want to concentrate on. This activity is called "Business process mapping" and is a brilliant way to comprehend how your business works & uncover anything that might seem counterproductive or weak. It visualizes all the operations that you have within the organization and determines the one suitable for optimization. It can be a straightforward pen and paper exercise or you can also map by using available software(s) in the market.?

STEP 2 - ANALYSIS

Now, we are ready for analysis of the pain points by using the Socratic method(Why? Why? Why?). A few practical questions are as listed below -

• Are there any steps in the process that are taking longer than they should?
• In case there are holds or missed deadlines, what is the primary factor for that?
• What are the steps that have the tallest impact on product quality, and is there any way to make them more efficient?
• Are some of the steps more financially sapping than the rest? Why & how?

Another widely known and utilised method is 5 Whys. The gist of 5 Whys is, you keep asking the question “why” until you discover the root cause of an issue. So for example, let’s say the situation is that the sales are down compared to the previous months, then you need to ask -?

• Why are the sales down? - Because the team isn’t closing as many customers as usual.
• Why is that? - Because the leads are weaker than expected.
• Why is that? - Because the marketing team has been pushing out new tip generation associates.
• Why is that? - Because they can no longer afford the previously engaged associate.
• Why is that? - Because the associate upped their fees by 20%.

Once you get to the root cause of the situation, it’s much more manageable to come up with a solution. In this case, you’d analogise the new sales number with the old ones, and if the profit difference is higher than the 20% expense for the old partner, you’d want to contemplate switching back.

STEP 3 - REDESIGN

Now that the pain points have been identified, you can get identifying the redesigning process i.e. How do we change it? There's no one-size fit answer for this. Based on the situation-dependent variable, the new and improved design needs to be carved out.

Some of the best practices include -

• Pick the right metrics for comparison?– You’d want to compare your new approach to the old one in terms of efficiency, so you can empirically know whether it’s more profitable or not.
• Work with field-level employees?- Chances are, they might have some valuable intake on what you could improve on.
• Think long-term & account for error?- In some cases, your resolution works wonders in the short term, but demonstrates to be inefficient or costly in the long term.
• Define the exact scope of changes?- You should know exactly what influence your solution will have, or you’ll be unlocking a risk you could have avoided.
• Perform risk analysis?- You can never foresee the outcome with 100% accuracy. You’d want to account for anything that can go awry. The manufacturing methodology, for example, might seem to work wonders originally – right up to the point when it completely breaks down due to some nominal oversight.

STEP 4 - IMPLEMENTATION

Okay. Now that the Pre-cursory activities are completed and you have a full setup on paper, let's get on with the practical aspect. Implementation is the most vital step for the success of a business process improvement initiative – if something goes amiss, you might end up losing more than whatever the unproductive process was costing you.

The stages for successful implementation are as follows…

• Implement the shifts at a small scale to mitigate risk. Before carrying out the changes throughout the entire organisation, you’re better off testing it at a small scale & benchmarking it to the original process.
• Acquire the fitting resources & illustrate the steps.
• Let all the stakeholders understand the shifts & upon approval commence implementing them.

STEP 5 - REFLECTION & REDEFINITION

Things don’t usually go exactly the way you plan them. Once you roll out the changes, you would want to reflect on all the effort spent on the activity and the results that you are getting out of it. Target vs Actual Metric is immensely helpful in apprehending the Improvement. This review/reflection will also need to be reported back to the Sponsor and the Stakeholder groups involved. Try feeding them Efficiency Gain as a projected metric specifically derived on a Year-on-Year basis. It's a major winner.

We do need to keep in mind though, not all BPI measures are a full-blown sensation at the first go. Hence, we should consider BPI as a process via the Continuous Implementation/Continuous Delivery(CI/CD) model.?

In the current marketplace, there are a ton of methodologies that can help us with BPI initiatives, quite famously Lean, Kaizen, 5S, Six Sigma, TQM etc.