Business Processes Are Business Assets

Business Processes are the means your People use to accomplish organizational Goals.  Processes produce value, serve customers, generate income, and add cost. Organizations are a collection of processes.  

Designing and managing these processes is key to the organization's success.  But most organizations are not properly structured to do either; they are organized functionally.  When designed, functional departments tend to optimize their steps for their department’s efficiency without consideration of the impact on the other steps or the process as a whole.  Furthermore, most people tend to focus their decisions locally to satisfy the concerns of their functional department, instead of on the global needs of the process customer.  Communication and management systems are established to ensure the desired outcomes, adding time, costs, and other waste to the organization, robbing profits, productivity, and competitive advantage.   

Just as employees use equipment to accomplish their work, they use processes, and as such, the processes must also be kept in good working condition.

Manufacturers know that a machine that is not working properly will produce scrap/waste and/or run inefficiently.  That machine gets repaired!  In fact, smart manufacturers perform preventive and predictive maintenance on their machinery so it doesn't deteriorate into a state of disrepair.  They perform diagnostics on the machinery and occasionally perform complete overhauls to ensure it runs properly.

How many businesses do you know treat their business processes the same way?  Do you?  Why not?  Business Processes are the machinery that produce your business'  information. 

Business processes can make or break your company.  They need to be as effective and efficient as possible.  You simply must give your people the right tools to do their jobs. 

And the benefits to the business are tremendous - 

	Statistics consistently show at least a 40 to 1 return on every dollar invested in cycle time reduction (business process improvement)
	Cycle time reduction can reduce overhead by as much as 50%
	As many as 75% of the steps in each business process are non-value added

Eighty-five percent (85%) of an organization's quality and productivity problems are built into the system. 

But We Designed the Perfect Process Years Ago!

"Business processes don't wear out like mechanical or electrical equipment, do they?"  

Business processes do get out of whack just like equipment does.  Here are a few of the more common reasons - 

	The process was not properly designed in the first place.
	Business goals or strategies change, but the processes don't.
	The requirements changed over time and revisions were patched in.
	The environment changed, but not the process.
	Requirements changed, but nothing was done to include them (e.g. order processing time decreased, but employees were just told to work harder).
	Technology tools were added, but never exploited (application software was installed, employees were trained and told to use, but nothing improved).
	New processes were created for every exception, making it difficult to know what to do.
	Processes were never documented and changed at the whim of the individuals performing it.

A quick example - 

A major consumer products company's strategy was "make then sell" to satisfy its original domestic market.  To this end, every strategy focused on efficiency -  machines were made to produce product at higher rates with longer set-up times, products were warehoused, export products were assigned to equally "disrupt" each plant, etc.  

Over a few years, their market changed from 3% export to over 35%.  This caused major problems executing the way they previously had.  As good as their processes were a few years earlier, the processes were now out of sync with the business.  

What Can TROPOS Success Systems Do?

TROPOS Success Systems helps you identify your key processes, improve them, and implement the results. 

Identification

The first step is to identify those processes that need to be improved.  In an ideal world, an organization would improve all its processes, but no organization really has the resources to attempt this.   

So it's important to identify those processes that receive your attention.  There are   several factors to balance in the selection process - mission critical, high cost, high volume, quality issues, customer service, etc. We help you the processes to return the greatest profits to you. 

Improvement

We help you determine the appropriate level of improvement required for this process - continuous improvement, redesign, reengineering.  Not every process needs to be reengineered.    

We facilitate you through a proven structured, but flexible methodology that ensures your process design is both effective and efficient.  We guide you, teach you, challenge you, cajole you; we push you to create the best process possible.

But you develop the processes; you own the results; you live with results.

"Nothing is more useless than to make more efficient something that shouldn't be done in the first place." Peter Drucker  

Implementation - More Than Design

More Than Activities

The concept of Business Processes is too often oversimplified to be just a series of activities.  To be really effective, it must be much more than that!  

In order to optimize process performance, we also examine policies, procedures, tools (including technology), inputs and outputs, input and output requirements, tasks, job definitions, control mechanisms, measurements, organization structure, education, training, and the process management system.  

We help you get everybody and everything moving in the same, positive direction.

Business Process Improvement isn't a management fad. It's a proven strategy to redesign your core business processes, eliminating waste and improving productivity. 
Your organization can't afford to be without it.

Continue the tour to Why This Works.