Cost Reduction Through Process Mapping - Evidence Based Activities

By Gary Eckstein

Process reengineering exercises are often treated with skepticism. They are seen as expensive documentation exercises that do not add tangible business benefits. Unfortunately this negative view of process mapping has some justification in that teams of process specialists are frequently employed to document what happens or should happen and the benefit of the mapping activities are either not communicated or are inadequately justified (or, a little too frequently, results just aren't forthcoming).

Towards Evidence Based Process Mapping
 
Process improvement exercises, if performed for the correct reasons, can be substantially beneficial in meeting organizational goals. The key to successful process enhancement, from a strategic perspective, is to aim for high performance and tangible business benefits. The objectives of any process mapping, as well as expected results, must be communicated at project initiation. Subsequent to the new process implementation actual results must be communicated. The justifying of process improvement initiatives aims to align tangible business benefits with any process improvement work.
 
Process Example
 
The most effective means of conveying the necessity of evidence based Process Mapping is demonstrated via an example:

I have worked occasionally for a certain large organization. This organization employs several thousand time based contractors whose contracts are often extended beyond the usual six month contract term. The organization is very good at disabling computer network accounts of the contractors when their contracts expiration dates are realized. The problem arises in that if the contract is renewed then the expiration date is not amended timeously to match the new expiration date. This results in thousands of contractors being unable to login to the computer network for up to a few days each per year. At a very rough guess this would cost well over a million dollars per year in lost productivity and time of others running around attempting to get computer network access regranted to the contractors.

This is a perfect evidence based example for a Process Improvement initiative; it would be simple to calculate the benefit of replacing the current process with one that addresses the constraint (the Theory of Constraints can certainly be used to good affect here in identifying the bottleneck in the process). Some effort in mapping the 'as is' and 'to be' processes and initiating activities to reach the 'to be' process will likely realize significant cost savings and productivity increases. What is stopping this process improvement activity taking place however is that either the process owner is unaware of the need to improve the process (this is hard to believe) or the benefits of a process engineering exercise havn't been calculated. The result of not reengineering this particular process is that money continues to be needlessly spent whilst contractors remain unproductive!

Recommendations

Process Mapping and reengineering can realize cost savings, productivity improvements and income generation. The key to process improvement buy-in remains in the focusing and communicating of benefits to be attained by Process Mapping initiatives. Here are the key recommendations:

1. Ensure that all processes have an Owner.
2. Process Owners must be held accountable for continuous process improvement.
3. Process improvement initiatives must be evidence based and aligned to organizational objectives.
4. Communication of process improvement successes must be communicated.

As in the example, process improvement can work significantly towards organizational objectives. The cost spent on Process Mapping and Improvement, if based on evidence, will be money very well spent!

Gary Eckstein is a Business Consultant specialising in adding value to small and medium size businesses. Gary is also active in ecommerce such as with Online Blu-ray retailing. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gary_Eckstein

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