Business Process Improvement: The Breakthrough Strategy for Total Quality, Productivity, and Competitiveness

1. Streamlining suggests the trimming of waste and excess, attention to every minute detail that might lead to improved performance and quality. 2. Streamlining provides a smooth flow. 3. With streamlining, the process will operate with the least disturbance to its surroundings. 4. The 12 cornerstones tools to streamlining: a. Eliminate bureaucracy b. eliminate duplication c. Evaluate every activity in the business process to determine its contribution to meeting customer requirements. d. Simplify e. determine ways to compress cycle time to meet or exceed customer expectations and minimize storage costs. f. Make effective use of capital equipment and the working environment to improve overall performance. G. make if difficult to do the activity incorrectly h. reduce the complexity of the way we write and talk i. Standardize - select a single way to do the activity j. create a structure and policy that encourages supplier feedback and partnership k. big picture improvement - look for creative ways to drastically change the process l. automate and mechanize. 5. Improvement of a process means changing a process to make it more effective, efficient, and adaptable. 6. Preventing means you change the process to ensure that errors never reach the customer. 7. Excelling means that the process works, it is stable, and meets customer requirements. 8. Bureaucracy is bad, boring, burdensome, and brutal. 9. Bureaucracy often creates excessive paperwork in the office 10. Managers typically spend 40 to 50 percent of their time writing and reading job-related material; 60 percent of al clerical work is spent on checking, filing, and retrieving information, while only 40 percent is spent on important process-related tasks. 11. Evaluate and minimize all delays, red tape, documentation, reviews and approvals 12. Management reduces bureaucracy by starting with a directive. The directive informs management and employees that each approval signature and review active will be financially justified, that reducing total cycle time is a key business objective, and any non-value added activities will be targeted for elimination. 13. A bureaucracy step should be left in only if there is a sizeable, documented savings from the activity. 14. Duplication of data from different parts of the organization can produce conflicting data and lead to the unbalancing of the organization. For example sales may generate a monthly customer production ship forecast and production control distributes a completely different forecast. 15. Accrual means the value of the end product exceeds the accumulated costs. Value added=value after processing - value before processing. 16. Value added assessment is an analysis of every activity in the business process to determine its contribution to meet end-customer expectations. 17. Value is defined from the point of view of the end customer or the business process. 18. Waste occurs when activities exist because the pro

I recently re-read this book, first published in 1991, and found that - despite all the changes which have occurred in the business world since then - most of its material remains solid and relevant. In the Preface, H. James Harrington observes that organizations "are thinking differently about their processes. Processes are no longer viewed as just production processes. Today (i.e. in 1991), management realizes that that there are many processes that use material, equipment, and people to provide many types of outputs and services. They are called business processes, and today they are even more important to competitiveness than production processes." In this context, I am reminded of what Peter Drucker asserted (in 1963) in an article which appeared in the Harvard Business Review: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." Presumably this is what Harrington has in mind when suggesting that "automating a bad process not only ensures that we can do a bad job every times but that we can do it faster and with less effort than before." Harrington carefully organizes his material within ten chapters, followed by an appendix that provides "Interview Guidelines." His pragmatic approach throughout the narrative focuses on what to do to initiate and then sustain business process improvement (BPI): Focus on business processes Set the stage for BPI Organize for process improvement Use flowcharting to draw a process "picture" Understand the process characteristics Streamline the process Use measurements, feedback, and action to "load, aim, and fire" Qualify (i.e. establish credibility for) process Benchmark process For me, some of the most interesting and valuable material is provided in Chapter 5, "Understanding the Process Characteristics." Harrington identifies five (Flow, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Cycle Time, and Cost) and explains what must be done to get them in proper alignment (hence the importance of a flow chart) in terms of people involved, objectives to be achieved, strategies and tactics to be executed, measurements, evaluation, and modification. As they embark together on a journey to achieve the desired objectives, they should realize that they will be involved in a marathon, not a sprint. They must be persistent but patient. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out sources which were published later, such as Dan Madison's Process Mapping, James R. Press's Process Improvement and Process Management, Process Improvement Essentials: CMMI, Six SIGMA, and ISO 9001, John Jeston and Johan Nelis' Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementation, and Paul Harmon's Business Process Change: A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating Processes.

In the actual times of constant, requiring and increasing professional improvement, you just have just only an alternative: to isolate yourself from the world: It's not an optional choice, but a question of surviving. The leadership process must involve all the team under his service; otherwise your destiny is uncertain in the values market: your market share will vanish silently and if you don't act and react faster than the business dynamic, you will be out of game: I think the comparison may be established without any risk: the quality in the Darwinian environment will become in an additional gene to survive. You do not have to think but living according this life system. This adaptation process has a hard barrier, the resistance to change: most of people live with this mental premise: the minimum effort and the maximum boring. Arnold Toynbee wrote about the minority creators, that attitude does not sound challenging for any artistic activity, because the quality, conceived as one the main ingredients of the creative work is inherent in the inner process. I wrote an article in the local press in 1996 named "Art and quality" (available for any one who is interested) in which I remarked this ineffable premise. James Hillman stated once that the first enemy of the art is the mediocrity, and the quality process in last instance follows that change of behavior. In this sense Harrington's text is a fundamental guide that explains step by step a wholesome creation process of a qualitative thinking, you will obtain the practice tools and the extreme useful basic elements available for any person.

This book was highly recommended to me and it did not dissappoint. Simple yet powerful practices and principles are clearly laid out in an easily understood manner. I now have a foundation to build upon with future readings on the subject of BPI.

This book is a great investement. This book explains much more than Business Process Improvement, it also breaks down the sub categories of Quality management into easy to digest pieces. Harrington makes the complex/theoretical Quality "mechanics" easy to understand. He explains today's business trends which can help any business become more productive. Manufacturing Industries have been using these Quality techniques for years and Harrington helps any business adopt these "tried & true" measures. I recommend this book to anyone who is in the Quality field, or for anyone who is embarking in TQM.