A relentless focus on customer value and lead time reduction will drive transparency, efficiency and clarity - ultimately providing better services with less effort. The approach prioritises simplification and sustainability in improvement efforts. Quick wins are only an added benefit, not the goal.
Fighting complexity
Most organisations today face an ever growing amount of complexity. Complexity emerged from changing customer needs and market conditions, rapid technological advances and regulatory amendments.
The symptoms are noticed as complexity accumulated in the organisations’ key processes.
The usual response? Disintegrated processes and introduction of performance metrics to monitor the chopped up processes. Thereby, we abandon an end-to-end (E2E) process mindset that should benefit both customers and the organisation.
E2E is a matter of building and improving processes across the value chain and embedding flow into company structures, collaborative processes and daily routines.
The approach takes a holistic view on processes and prioritises simplification and sustainability in improvement efforts. Quick wins are only an added benefit, not the goal. The purpose is clear: Release potential by dissolving silo thinking, zooming out on total lead time and reducing total process costs. This means directing improvement efforts to opportunities across departments and functions.
Focus on flow
When chopping up process flows, organisations tend to focus the improvements on individual activities and reduce the related resource consumption: Can we make the individual employee work more efficiently?
Though filled with good intentions of reducing costs, this will lead to suboptimal decisions. The organisation will be left with little chance to identify the actual cause of the cost or value creation of serving the customers.
We know from two decades of process improvement that there is a huge potential in looking at our processes with another mindset:
Improve the total flow between each process step and you improve on multiple dimensions: speed and accuracy for customers, efficiency and motivation for employees.
Focusing on creating flow from E2E will drive increased efficiency compared to how organisations end up spending their resources when optimising individual activities. The effects come through transparency to make the fundamentally best decisions early on in the process, thereby removing extra work caused by having to manage the non-value adding tasks that always follow from a process that is not designed for flow.