Why is this important?

Organisations rely on their processes to carry out their work yet more than 50% of companies do not have up-to-date process documentation.  The figures about those companies that have documented procedures but do not follow them are even more worrying!

If companies are the sum of their processes, it is vital that the way work is carried out is as good as it can be.

Good processes are essential to efficient, cost effective individual, departmental and organisational activities.

How we can help

Through a regime of process mapping, we usually start by documenting the core processes as they exist today.  Next the processes are studied to determine whether they can be improved and for this we use a set of techniques that have proved their merit in past projects.  Improvements can come from making the processes happen faster, cost less or produce higher quality outputs.

We can generate process documentation and process maps for organisations.  Below is an example of one type of process map that has been produced for a client.  For this client, the interface between different departments was an important factor in the quality and effectiveness of the process.  As a result, the work carried out by different departments was coloured so that these interfaces were more visible and could be addressed during the process improvement phase.  Typically, these visual documents are accompanied by textual descriptions that explain the process in more details or as a series of desk instructions and are hyperlinked to the map for ease of navigation.

Process improvement work often follows on from Activity Based Management projects and can be used to prepare for profit improvement and cost reduction projects.