If businesses decided to consistently stay the same over time, many of them would collapse. Innovation requires change, and if businesses don’t change to meet customer demands, they won’t achieve much growth.
This is why many organizations use some form of process improvement methodology to adapt their processes to customer demands.
Business process improvements are methodologies in which a team evaluates their current processes and adapts them with the intent to increase productivity, streamline workflows, adapt to changing business needs, or increase profitability.
There are seven different business process improvement methodologies your team can use to help reduce inefficiencies. In most cases, the methodology you choose depends on why you want to improve your processes and what you’re looking to improve.
Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology that aims to minimize the amount of variations within the end product. Developed in 1986 by American engineer and Motorola employee Bill Smith, this process uses statistical data as benchmarks to help business leaders understand how well their processes work. A process is considered optimized if it produces less than 3.4 defects per one million cycles.
Six Sigma is often used in manufacturing, mainly because it helps minimize defects and inconsistencies. The goal here is to optimize for consistency, which in the end leads to customer satisfaction.
There are two main processes used in Six Sigma: DMAIC for existing processes and DMADV for new processes. Since this article focuses specifically on improvements to existing processes, let’s dive into the DMAIC process.
DMAIC is a Six Sigma process used to optimize existing processes. DMAIC stands for:
The bulk of the DMAIC process improvement happens during the analysis stage. During the analysis stage of DMAIC, teams use a fishbone diagram, or an Ishikawa diagram, to visualize the possible causes of a product defect. The head of the fishbone diagram states the initial problem—then as you follow along the spine of the fish, each rib lists different categories of issues that can lead to the initial problem. This type of visual analysis is a good way to identify the different issues one root cause can create.
Total quality management (TQM) is a customer-focused method that involves continuous improvement over time. This technique is often used in supply chain management and customer satisfaction projects.
TQM relies heavily on data-driven decisions and performance metrics. During the problem solving process, you use success metrics to decide how you can improve a process.
Here some key features of TQM:
Process-focused: The main goal of implementing TQM is to improve processes. Other process improvement methods like Six Sigma work to minimize the amount of defects, while TQM works to decrease inefficiencies.
This form of process improvement goes by many names, with lean manufacturing being the most common. It may also be referred to as Lean production or just-in-time production. Defined by James P. Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos in the book "The Machine That Changed the World," Lean highlights five main principles based off of the authors' experiences at Toyota manufacturing.
The Japanese philosophy of kaizen guides the continuous improvement model. Kaizen was born from the idea that life should be continuously improved so we can lead more satisfying and fulfilling lives.
This same concept can be applied to business—because as long as you are continuously improving, your business can become more successful. The goal of continuous improvement is to optimize for activities that generate value and to get rid of any waste.
There are three types of waste that kaizen aims to remove:
The PDCA cycle is an interactive form of problem solving. It's used to improve processes and implement change. PDCA was created by Walter Shewhart when he applied the scientific method to economic quality control. Later, the idea was developed even further by W. Edwards Deming, who expanded on Shewhart's idea and used the scientific method for process improvement in addition to quality control.
There are four main steps to the PDCA cycle:
PDCA is an improvement cycle. This means that these steps can be repeated until your team reaches the desired result.
The 5 Whys analysis is a process improvement technique used to identify the root cause of a problem. It's a really simple process in theory: you gather a group of stakeholders who were involved in a failure, and one person asks: "Why did this go wrong?" Repeat this question approximately five times, until you get to the root cause of an issue. The 5 Whys analysis aims to identify the issues within a process, but not human error.
Here's an example:
Problem: There was an increase in customer complaints regarding damaged products.
You can see from this example that the team asked “Why” until they identified the process error that needs to be fixed—in this case, adding a “stress test new packaging” step into their product launch template. When working with stakeholders in processes like this, it's important to identify the issues, and co-create next steps together so that your production can improve.
Business process management, or BPM, is the act of analyzing and improving business processes. Much like any organic being, businesses grow and shift over time. Your team may have implemented processes that worked when your team was small, but as you grow those processes may not scale in a way that allows your team to be as efficient as possible.
Most of the time, BPM helps teams identify bottlenecks, ways to automate manual work, and strategies to improve inefficiencies. There are five main steps to business process management.
As a team lead, one of the most valuable things you can bring to your team are clearer processes and better workflows. When used effectively, process improvement increases your team's productivity and decreases inefficiencies.
To increase clarity and improve processes, try work management. Work management tools like Asana can help you take your team’s productivity to the next level by standardizing processes, streamlining workflows, and keeping your team in sync.