BPI - Business Process Improvement

Can you identify and fix a broken process?

Every company has many different business processes. But what are they, exactly?

In short, business processes constitute all the activities your company engages in—using people, technology, and information—to carry out its mission, set goals, measure performance, serve customers, and address the inevitable challenges that arise while doing so. Processes determine the effectiveness and efficiency of your company's operations, the quality of your customers' experience—and ultimately, your organization's financial success.

Processes can also vary in their degree of formality. For example:

• Informal: A customer asks you for a discount if they purchase double the normal amount of your product. There is no rule saying you can't provide such a discount, nor is there an established way to give the discount. So you give the discount. You have just created an informal process. The company hasn't documented this process as a set of steps that must be performed under certain conditions. For now at least, the discount program exists only in your head.
• Formal: You manage a call center that resolves customer concerns over the phone and through the Internet. You and your team have established a rigorous set of procedures for answering customers' questions and solving their problems. Your team has documented these procedures, and all new employees are required to study them and receive training before staffing the call center's phones. Thus, the processes for handling customer concerns are highly formalized.

When the process goes wrong......

Everyone in and related to your organization—you, your boss, peers, and direct reports, and your customers and suppliers—carries out many different processes every day. But because business processes are invisible, many people don't consciously think about them or realize the impact they have on an organization's performance. Instead, when problems do crop up (for example, a customer's order is filled incorrectly), people often look for someone to blame. Managers may spend time and money replacing the person supposedly at fault. Or they might choose to invest in expensive new technology to try to overcome the problem.

Yet many managers find that these "solutions" don't work. Ultimately, the same problems keep surfacing. What's going on? As it turns out, most organizational difficulties stem from flawed processes—not incompetent individuals or inadequate technology. By understanding the process glitches that led to a problem, you and your team can correct the process to get the results your company wants.

Adopted a process mindset.

When you have a process mindset, you regularly think about how to improve the way your group turns inputs into desired outputs. You seek to understand the quality of your group's business processes by using measurements and process mapping to discover and correct weak points.

You can cultivate a process mindset in your team by helping team members understand and articulate the many business processes they take part in, and by encouraging them to constantly look for ways to improve those processes. Your reward? Greater efficiency, higher customer satisfaction, reduced errors, lower costs, and enhanced company profitability.

Next week I will write about planning a process improvement.

Changing subject............

U$ 100,00 Challenge

These week we had a challenge in our business, we had to spend a lot in order to make some procedures in our clients, BUT WE DIDN´T HAVE THE MONEY FOR THAT!

We sit down made a meeting and realized that our company was divided in two things: 

1. Services: the procedure

2. Product: The materials for the Procedure.

starting from this point we understood better to tell our customers that the service would cost R$ 80,00 and the product would cost R$ 40,00 so at least we charged our clients with the cost of the products for the procedure first (in advanced) and after we charged the service. doing it we didn't need to disburse any money to do the procedures.