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Added for You - Adopting a Business Process Approach to Management - 6 Critical Steps
If you want to speed up your business in 2007, you'll need to fine-tune your business approach and utilise your resources to their full extent. However, like many business owners, you may be reluctant to tie up your capital. So where can you turn to if you're looking to finance major business-related purchases such as commercial vehicles, manufacturing machinery or IT equipment?The answer is simple: asset finance. Asset finance works in such a way that the money you borrow is secured upon the business assets you acquire. For instance, if you're planning to invest in a fleet of commercial vehicles, the money you borrow for your purchase will be secured solely on those vehicles. This means no other part of your business will be committed to - or at risk from - the deal.<
Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected.
Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity le
We Are All Outspent Most brands face daunting tasks in preparing marketing communications to steal market share. If you have unlimited budgets and are capable of out-spending the competitive set, your job is that much easier. For the rest of us, we have to learn how to win without the largest ad budgets and without dominating share of voice (SOV).There are some rules that Stealing Share has discovered in our quest to be the authority in stealing market share. In marketing, advertising, brand development, and the rest of one’s life, focus and clarity always lead to better results. How do you know when you have such focus? That is the subject of this short article.More Than The CategoryFirst, you must ma
In our previous article we emphasised the customer/stakeholder focus of the business process approach to management. The first step is therefore clearly determining who those customers and stakeholders are. Who buys or uses your product or service offering? Who makes the buying decision? What exactly are they buying in terms of benefits? Who else is affected by your activities and what are their expectations?
A small pharmaceutical manufacturer of multivitamins, antibiotics, syrups and OTC medicines for children, located in a large African city, was trying to answer these questions for their own organisation. They came up with the following.
Customer/Stakeholder and Benefits Sought
2.Determine the Value Chains that Deliver these Benefits
The information obtained from the above step should be formed into benefit clusters. Next, trace those benefits back from your products and services through to the inputs. The identified paths form your value chains or end to end core business processes.
Our pharmaceutical company took this step and concluded they had one major value chain consisting of two major processes - the new pharmaceuticals development process and the sales and production process.
All the benefits to the customers and other stakeholders are derivable from their product range, their distribution and market support and their information dissemination.
3. Decompose into Processes and Determine the Process Boundaries
The previous step yields an end-to-end view of the organisational value chains. We now need to determine the core processes and sub-processes that make up these value chains, and the support processes that enable them. The determination of process boundaries should combine top-down and down-up approaches applied iteratively.
Listing out the major processes in the value chain as we did in the previous step, is top-down. We might then take each major process identified and using the following procedure suggested by Patrick and McDermott, break them down into sub processes.
In the case of the pharmaceutical for example, we might find, after going through this sequence that the sales and production process decomposes into the customer acquisition (identify prospect, qualify prospect and establish contract) and order fulfilment (receive order, produce and assemble order, and ship order) sub-processes.
4. Select Appropriate Metrics Based on Critical Success Factors for the Identified Processes and Overall Strategy
It is well known that measurements and rewards drive behaviour. To ensure proper balance between focus on past/current performance, and the need to build capabilities that drive future success, we need metrics that track results, processes, organisational capability and the environment.
Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected.
Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity lev
Some of the new-generation nitrogen generators use the APSA process to generate nitrogen. This APSA process relies on the fractionated distillation of air at very low (cryogenic) temperatures, and in only one column. In other words, APSA nitrogen generators are nitrogen generators that use cryogenic distillation of air to generate nitrogen.After the air is being compressed, it is purified in the nitrogen generator, so that the cryogenic operation runs smoothly. The air is being compressed at around 9 bars with a centrifugal or a screw compressor and afterwards cooled down with the help of a cooling unit.The air that runs through the nitrogen generator must then be purified, so it passes through several filters and cooled down some more.Afterwards the crio
2.Determine the Value Chains that Deliver these Benefits
The information obtained from the above step should be formed into benefit clusters. Next, trace those benefits back from your products and services through to the inputs. The identified paths form your value chains or end to end core business processes.
Our pharmaceutical company took this step and concluded they had one major value chain consisting of two major processes - the new pharmaceuticals development process and the sales and production process.
All the benefits to the customers and other stakeholders are derivable from their product range, their distribution and market support and their information dissemination.
3. Decompose into Processes and Determine the Process Boundaries
The previous step yields an end-to-end view of the organisational value chains. We now need to determine the core processes and sub-processes that make up these value chains, and the support processes that enable them. The determination of process boundaries should combine top-down and down-up approaches applied iteratively.
Listing out the major processes in the value chain as we did in the previous step, is top-down. We might then take each major process identified and using the following procedure suggested by Patrick and McDermott, break them down into sub processes.
In the case of the pharmaceutical for example, we might find, after going through this sequence that the sales and production process decomposes into the customer acquisition (identify prospect, qualify prospect and establish contract) and order fulfilment (receive order, produce and assemble order, and ship order) sub-processes.
4. Select Appropriate Metrics Based on Critical Success Factors for the Identified Processes and Overall Strategy
It is well known that measurements and rewards drive behaviour. To ensure proper balance between focus on past/current performance, and the need to build capabilities that drive future success, we need metrics that track results, processes, organisational capability and the environment.
Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected.
Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity le
We all like to think we base our decisions on hard facts, but that’s not always the case. Business leaders will talk about doing their due diligence prior to making a decision; but in reality, when it comes down to it, what really pushes us to select one thing over another is our feelings.While instinct and intuition do play a role in business (stories abound of business people who refused to pay attention to the facts and created a success out of what should have been a disaster), 9 times out of 10, cold hard facts and reality cannot and should not be ignored.This new mini-series of BrandReturn™ (our newsletter’s new name) will introduce the basic concepts of business and market research, share some methods of obtaining data, and prod you to begin collecting da
All the benefits to the customers and other stakeholders are derivable from their product range, their distribution and market support and their information dissemination.
3. Decompose into Processes and Determine the Process Boundaries
The previous step yields an end-to-end view of the organisational value chains. We now need to determine the core processes and sub-processes that make up these value chains, and the support processes that enable them. The determination of process boundaries should combine top-down and down-up approaches applied iteratively.
Listing out the major processes in the value chain as we did in the previous step, is top-down. We might then take each major process identified and using the following procedure suggested by Patrick and McDermott, break them down into sub processes.
In the case of the pharmaceutical for example, we might find, after going through this sequence that the sales and production process decomposes into the customer acquisition (identify prospect, qualify prospect and establish contract) and order fulfilment (receive order, produce and assemble order, and ship order) sub-processes.
4. Select Appropriate Metrics Based on Critical Success Factors for the Identified Processes and Overall Strategy
It is well known that measurements and rewards drive behaviour. To ensure proper balance between focus on past/current performance, and the need to build capabilities that drive future success, we need metrics that track results, processes, organisational capability and the environment.
Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected.
Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity le
In short - YES!You should always include cover letters when applying for jobs, whether you are sending an application form or a resume/CV.Why you ask?We, as interviewers, can think of Three GOOD reasons:1. You engage the interviewer personally.By this we mean that if you write to a specific person, using their name, it makes them feel human to you.In fact, a survey conducted by the Royal Mail in 2004 found that CVs and cover letters addressed to a named person were significantly favoured over those addressed to a generic job title by 55% of Personnel Departments.Since you know the name of the person advertising the job, or can easily find it out, write to them. Don’t just put a CV or job ap
In the case of the pharmaceutical for example, we might find, after going through this sequence that the sales and production process decomposes into the customer acquisition (identify prospect, qualify prospect and establish contract) and order fulfilment (receive order, produce and assemble order, and ship order) sub-processes.
4. Select Appropriate Metrics Based on Critical Success Factors for the Identified Processes and Overall Strategy
It is well known that measurements and rewards drive behaviour. To ensure proper balance between focus on past/current performance, and the need to build capabilities that drive future success, we need metrics that track results, processes, organisational capability and the environment.
Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected.
Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity le
In part 1 of this article series, we described the general structure of a dimensional model. In the present article we shall describe the basic design principles of dimensional modeling. Dimensional modeling follows the four steps defined below. A. Selection of the business process (or processes), the performance of which shall be monitored. Business processes the performance of which is considered critical, and relevant data are sufficient (e.g. operations data derived from these processes), should be selected with priority. The selected business process, may relate to a single organizational unit, or spanning more than one organizational unit.The capture of overlapping information by different departments which can lead to many ve
Result measures are generally lagging in that they track past performance. By the time the result is measured, it is too late to do anything about it. Process measures are generally leading and prescriptive, since they predict future performance. Acting on factors that affect these measures will impact on future results. Care must be taken that metrics which drive the desired behaviour and customer valued outcomes are selected.
Having determined the critical factors that drive delivery of customer and stakeholder metrics or indicators of performance must be chosen, with targets for each measure, and cascaded down to individual sub processes. A line of sight must exist between overall organisational measures and the detailed measures at process and activity level.
Our pharmaceutical company chose to measure four categories. At the top level, the chosen metrics were:
5. Appoint Process Owners for Each Core Process
A major flaw of the functional orientation is that there is no one within the organisation that has a complete view of the process as experienced by the customers and stakeholders. The appointment of process owners overcomes this flaw.
The job of process owner is to manage the processes in the critical areas of improvement, boundary management, metrics, collaboration and advocacy. The process owner coordinates the functions and activities at all levels of the process, and has the authority and ability to makes changes to the process. He is responsible and accountable for its outcome.
6. Begin a Never Ending Cycle of Business Process Improvement
With your core processes defined and documented, appropriate metrics selected and process owner appointed, the next step is to begin an improvement cycle.
Using process diagrams, value stream maps and metrics, determine the current capabilities of your core processes. Identify and quantify areas of greatest opportunity using information from customer surveys, comparison of your process performance with a similar ideal process, etc.
Continuous business process improvement is the subject of our next article. Be sure to watch out for it.
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