When Performance improvement is important
Almost all organizations produce their primary products through processes. These processes often started simply and over time have adapted to changing requirements such as those arising from customer wishes, new technology, amended laws and regulations, etc.
Because processes are often not explicitly visible, capacity and quality problems often manifest themselves in the form of shortages of people and resources or substandard and late delivery of products. However, these are often secondary problems because they are the symptom of misaligned and/or dimensioned processes.
To enable the organization to run its processes as efficiently as possible, it is important to clearly determine which customer needs must be met and what the customer wishes to pay for. Based on this understanding, it is important to organize all the processes involved in such a way that they are geared to this. Subsequently, the capacity of each link in the chain is optimized for both lead time and quality with the right capacity for each unit/department/machine. Optimizing the processes is not a one-off exercise, but is also aimed at teaching methods and techniques by people who carry out and supervise the processes so that they themselves will be able to continuously measure and improve their processes.
Approach
- CONTRACTING (commissioning)
- DIRECTION SETTING (what are organizational, department and process goals)
- CHOOSE AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT(where to gain the most benefit)
- RESEARCH (process & data analysis)
- IMPLEMENT IMPROVEMENTS (specific per function & process and close to & by the people on the work floor)
- EMBEDDING IMPROVEMENTS (training employees to continue improving themselves)
Sample Performance Improvements
Supply chain management improvement of First Time Right delivery of materials up from 90% to 98%
The end-to-end supply chain for translations has been optimized for a large international streaming party. A total of more than 40 processes were analyzed in collaboration with the operational departments (approximately 300 people in total) to achieve better self-management of the daily planning and various improvement projects were carried out to improve processes. the result was an improvement of ‘First Time Right’ from approximately 88% to 98%, resulting in a huge reduction in workload and a huge increase in customer satisfaction.
Advertising sales revenue increased by 5% at 100% occupancy
A project was carried out for a start-up media company to encourage employees to continuously look for improvements in their processes. This has resulted in optimized processes where suppliers have been asked to improve their systems so that they better support the processes of the startup, these improvements are implemented by the operational teams themselves. A project was also used to identify the most important bottlenecks in order to generate more turnover while maintaining the same amount of advertising minutes. This resulted in a new KPI that is now used by all teams involved. Another very important benefit is that the teams are enthusiastic about the approach and are motivated to continue the continuous improvement.
Quality Control process speeded up with factor 4
For a Shared Services Center, the quality control of audio and video materials in the existing process has been analyzed in detail for value-adding and non-value-adding activities, as part of a project to digitize and automate as many tasks as possible by using the latest workflow management solutions (WFM). The project resulted in reducing the processing time from 2 (working) days to half a (working) day. As a result, this department was able to spend more time on customer relationship management to further increase the organization’s revenue.
Indication of methods to be used
- Customer Centric Design
- Lean – Agile
- SCRUM
- Lean Six Sigma
- Business Process Redesign
- Total Quality Management