Process Management

When things go wrong, is it a statement of incompetence or poor process management? In most instances it is the latter!

In today�s business environment it is impossible for one or one group of people to fully know or understand all the dynamics associated with the operational business processes within an organization. This is why it is essential that companies map, monitor, analyze and collaborate on process knowledge and management improvement. QPR ProcessGuide helps you manage your processes!

Continuously Improve Operations for Success

A business process is any broad collection of activities within your company that is involved in the ultimate goal of developing your product or service for the customer, whether that customer is internal or external from your business. Business processes are typically evaluated from the customer's viewpoint. Effective business processes are essential in maximizing the added value provided to your customers. Managing the key processes efficiently is thus critical to the success of the company.

Managing processes is harder than it may seem at first - mostly because these processes do not stand alone, but interact with one another.

There are many types of business processes such as key processes, support processes and sub-processes. Typical business processes include:

Procurement: Securing the materials and equipment necessary to produce your goods or services.
Product development: Planning new goods or services for your customers or refining existing products.
Production: Creating those goods or services.
Order delivery: Receiving orders from customers and ensuring that those orders are fulfilled.
Distribution: Ensuring smooth distribution of goods to customers.
Customer support: Providing assistance to customers after they've bought your product or service.

The further you take your process work, the greater the potential return is. To ensure continuous, successful process development and improvement you need to consider important key issues.

Targets should be clear and measurable.
Ensuring strong commitment from both management and personnel is essential.
Your personnel are a valuable source of information. Involvement greatly assists in creating the commitment and ensuring the acceptance of proposed changes.
Communication is what helps you create involvement, commitment, and target setting.

Figure 1

Building a process-oriented model can solve many problems that are hidden from a traditional functional viewpoint. A process model is designed to help all people involved understand the whole picture and their part in it. Building such a model requires teamwork, to ensure that all available knowledge is used in the model. A basic model can consist of specific activities, process steps, organizational functions, information and material. The model can also contain notes about potential problems in the business process, ideas for improvement and other comments.

Quality documentation is an important part of business process management. Documenting all the processes in your company aids communication throughout the organization. The greatest challenge in the organization is to keep the quality documentation up-to-date and accessible to those involved. A great help in keeping the documentation up-to-date is to use the company's Intranet. Documentation is also a crucial element in any quality project e.g. when implementing ISO 9000/14000.

Benefits

The greatest advantage of process orientation is that it helps you understand how things are really done in your organization, revealing problems, bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could remain hidden in a typical organization that is on the face of it functioning normally. Process Management also helps you:

Reduce lead times
Decrease costs
Improve internal efficiency
Improve overall quality
Increase customer and employee satisfaction

Process orientation also contributes to a better understanding of the ultimate goal and output of the company and the individual's role in it. But most important is the notion that the processes and their output are the real interface with your customers - not just individual functions of your organization. Modelling and analyzing your business processes enables you to develop your organization and improve its effectiveness and quality of work.

With the powerful, easy-to-use QPR ProcessGuide, you can:

Create comprehensive business process models to illustrate the current status of operations
Standardize work practices by designing uniform guidelines e.g. for quality systems
Reengineer and improve your business processes to ensure optimized flow of materials, resources and information
Communicate processes effectively with graphically attractive flowcharts via the interactive web client
Work with action plans and comments in the same web client.
Inform about changes with Briefing Booklets
Provide strategic process mapping or performance management solution by integrating processes with Balanced ScoreCard measures
Simulate processes to identify potential bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization and validate improvements
Analyze processes, illustrate and benchmark results with the highly visual and easy-to-understand graphs and reports of QPR ProcessGuide

Download QPR ProcessGuide
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