How to design an excellent process

Last time, we explained how performance comes from the process. This time, we’ll look at what it takes to build excellence into a process.

It starts with getting the right mindset: an understanding of, and commitment to, the overarching principles, key concepts and standards of process excellence.

Here are 14 interrelated factors that are relevant to just about every process in every organisation:

1. Understand value: ‘Value’ is what the customer wants from the product or service and is willing to pay for. Value is defined by the customer, but many businesses assume they know what the customer wants, which creates significant dangers.
2. Build in quality to minimise the cost of poor quality: External quality means providing what matters to the customer and delivering it when required. But quality does not necessarily need to be ‘gold-plated’; customers might just want something basic and inexpensive. Internal quality (‘process quality’) means ensuring that the processes are capable of delivering what the customer wants, right-first-time, every time, efficiently and effectively. Management thinker  Philip Crosby argued that, far from being expensive, process quality is free. That’s because, self-evidently, it is cheaper not to have to fix things that we shouldn’t have allowed to go wrong in the first place!
3. Flow: Flow is the movement of work (material and information) through the value stream. The aim is perfect flow – for the work to move through the entire value-adding process without error, delay or waste (any activity or resource use that either adds no value or clogs up the process).
4. Evenness: Evenness is the dynamic matching of capability and demand, to maintain flow and consistently deliver to promise in the face of fluctuations in various internal and external factors.
5. Operate within capability (staying out of overburden): Overburden occurs when the demand on the process exceeds capability. When pushed beyond capability into overload, a process degrades in both the short and long term. (See our Optimisation vs maximisation post for more on this)
6. Dynamic resilience: The process should be resilient enough to deal with both predictable challenges and the occasional shock.
7. Balance: A balanced process is one where each stage runs at the same speed, so that no steps are either a bottleneck or are waiting too long for material or information from preceding steps.

8. Standardise: A standard is the best (or least worst!) way that the business has currently found to do something. Defining and consistently following standards is the foundation of the ability to reliably produce results that match capability. (Standards are also necessary for testing the relative impact of improvement efforts.)
9. Prime and maintain: To allow people to begin work immediately at the start of the day/shift and work effectively to the end of it, without unnecessary interruption, processes must be properly primed and maintained. This means ensuring the availability of tools and equipment that are in working order and able to last the full working day without downtime or loss of efficiency. (5S and Total Productive Maintenance are useful tools for doing this.)
10. Resource effectively: Processes also need to be effectively resourced at the start of, and throughout, each day with:
    • The right quality and quantity of raw materials (and other supplies) at the right time
    • The right information regarding demand, schedules etc. provided to the right people at the right time
    • Enough people with the right skills available in the right place at the right time
11. Error-proof: Process steps that are particularly vulnerable to mistakes should be error-proofed so that they are easy to get right, difficult to get wrong and highlight clearly when errors are made.
12. Pull: The ‘pull’ concept is based on the ‘supermarket model’ (or ‘kanban’ system), where the customer picks exactly what they need when they need it, triggering a chain of events that replenishes what was used; i.e. demand is pulled through the process, from customer activity, rippling back upstream. The alternative is a ‘push’ system where scheduling is determined by a centralised process based on forecasts and estimates. The dangers with this include the potential for either overproduction or underproduction relative to demand.
13. Measure: Effective measurement is fundamental to understanding, managing and improving processes, both in real time and over the longer term. This requires:
    • Output measures that show overall process performance. They are likely to include quality, cost and delivery performance measures. They are lag measures, showing the results of actions already taken.
    • In-process measures – real-time measures that allow problems to be spotted and in-flight adjustments made. These ‘lead measures’ enable more responsive management of process performance.
14. Manage and improve: There are three main pillars to this:
    • Daily meeting: To review, plan and resolve issues that could quickly grow into disruptive problems
    • Gemba walk: Where a team leader physically walks the process to ensure that all looks well, and checks in with the people involved, to pick up and discussing any emerging issues
    • Improvement time: A typical standard for excellent organisations is about 5% of working time, or around two hours per person per week (comfortably less than the time routinely lost weekly to wastes and inefficiencies)

To dive deeper on any of these factors, head to our Guide to process excellence, which is an extract from our book Toward Excellence.

Questions to consider:
By focusing on any number of these factors, it’s likely you’ll save money, improve customer satisfaction and increase capacity.

• What part of your business contains the biggest opportunity for improvement?
• How much is poor process quality currently costing you?

Let’s get to work

Over 27 years of practice, we have developed a comprehensive, time-tested and field-proven business-improvement model and toolkit. We partner with ambitious businesses to identify strategic breakthrough opportunities in capability, performance and results, and we provide the tools, support, training and coaching to complement their existing expertise and help them achieve these.

If you’re aiming to build or optimise a business system using sound principles, values and standards to deliver consistently excellent and continuously improving results, we can help you develop and implement a strategy to accelerate progress and amplify the impact of your journey.

To get in touch, contact us here to book a free consultation.

Discover more of our tools and methodology in our book Toward Excellence.