Business Process Improvement

"How will your business transform its product or service delivery to better provide what customers desire?"

By transforming their business into a customer focused, constantly improving, fact based value delivery system.

Transforming businesses into the above criteria has been the focus of many efforts over the years and, unfortunately, many companies have come up short of this goal. Achieving this goal does not come from one single tool application or methodology. It comes from carefully evaluating each business area and applying the method which focuses on that specific issue within that area. What this means is, there is no ‘silver bullet’. Single methodologies have been typically suboptimal for all business applications. This is not to say that one method cannot deliver value to a business, but in order to transform holistically, you must focus the right methods on the right areas.

Thinking lean, which requires an understanding of customer demand along with creating a culture of continuous improvement, companies can deliver higher value, faster. Foundational Lean tools like 5s, Method Sheets, Total Production Maintenance along with Lean awareness training will help businesses transition to a waste eliminated and customer focused culture. Driving data decisions by utilizing Six Sigma, which is focused on variation elimination and process control, will greatly improve ROI for not only process improvement, but also in new product development/delivery. Starting the improvement with a focus on the constraining steps, which are identified by using a Theory of Constraint philosophy, will allow quick wins and faster movement to where companies need to move their business. As with all improvement methodologies, a business must transform by foundationally keeping their customers needs at the forefront, while driving a continuous improvement culture at every level in becoming better, day after day, in their journey toward greatness.

Theory of Constraints or TOC is an improvement methodology which will focus efforts in your process toward the step which is constraining your system and keeping your from delivering value to your customer. It is a systematic method which has four steps: Identification of your constraint, exploit the constraint, subordinate everything in the line to that constraint and finally elevate the constraint so that it can be ‘broken’. Once the constraint is broken the cycle will start over with the next identified constraint.

TOC is a simple systematic improvement methodology that will improve production Throughput, which is defined as the products or services that have been purchased by the customer. Inventory, which simply put are the things transformed into Throughput, can be minimized and optimized to improve production effectiveness. By managing Operating Expense (the costs that are spent to turn Inventory into Throughput) a company will ensure that the customers will be served with a quality and timely product or service delivery.