Process improvement can go by several different names, such as business process management (BPM), business process improvement (BPI), business process reengineering, continuous improvement process (CIP), to name a few. Total quality management (TQM) is a customer-centered method that involves continuous improvement over time. This technique is often used in supply chain management and customer satisfaction projects. This form of process improvement goes by many names, with lean manufacturing being the most common.
It can also be referred to as lean production or just-in-time production. Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos, in the book The Machine that Changed the World, Lean highlights five main principles based on the authors' experiences in manufacturing Toyota. Any time in a process where a person (or position) or a group transfers the element that is going through the process to another person; a transfer can add defects, time and costs to the process. A role describes a set of related activities that a single person can perform on a regular basis to partially or fully complete a process or objective.
A process used to identify, analyze, and restructure an organization's core business processes with the goal of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service and speed. When working with stakeholders in processes like this, it's important to identify problems and create next steps together so that production can improve. The customer's voice should drive efforts to improve or redesign the process, and it is a key source of data in the project selection process. It refers to a data-based improvement cycle that is used to improve, optimize and stabilize business processes and designs.
Agile is a general term and conceptual framework used to describe a series of “lightweight” methodologies, such as extreme programming (XP), SCRUM and rapid application development (RAD), which have a number of common characteristics. The improvement approach focuses on incremental changes, involves solutions to eliminate or reduce defects, costs or cycle time; it leaves intact the basic design and assumptions of a process. It is defined as the sequence and interactions of the related steps, activities, or process tasks that make up an individual process, from start to finish. Process mapping is used to visually demonstrate all the steps and decisions of a particular process in order to achieve a clearer understanding of that process or of a series of parallel processes.
It models the actions (or behaviors) performed by the components of a business process or an IT system, the order in which the actions are carried out, and the conditions that coordinate the actions in a specific order. Your team may have implemented processes that worked when it was small, but as you grow, those processes may not scale in a way that makes your team as efficient as possible. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy. Those process steps that do not add value to the product or service, including performing work that goes beyond the customer's specifications.
It usually ranges from 3 to 5 days and generally focuses on process stages, transfers and delays with the goal of improving by a minimum of 50%. Gap analysis is the process of comparing two things to determine the difference or “gap” that exists between them.
