Ideas

Beyond Operational Excellence

Business Transformation

True business transformation is based on process design and management. We consider process to be end-to-end work that produces something of value. More formally, it is an organized group of related activities that together create customer value.

End-to-End Perspective

The focus in a process is not on individual units of work, which by themselves accomplish nothing for a customer, but rather on an entire group of activities that, when effectively brought together, create a result that customers value. A customer does not care that we have allocated inventory or planned a delivery; the customer only cares that he receives the goods he has ordered in a timely manner. The difference between process and task is the difference between whole and part, between ends and means.

The Process Journey

As more and more enterprises strive to harness the power of their end-to-end enterprise business processes, the need for a process implementation roadmap has become vital. It is now beyond dispute that redesigning and managing end-to-end processes delivers dramatic improvements in speed, cost, quality, and service; and that these improvements can, in turn, yield overwhelming strategic advantage.

Dramatic Improvements in Performance

In cross-functional processes ranging from order fulfillment to human resource management to product development, an integrated approach to process improvement, redesign, ownership, and governance has demonstrably saved corporations billions of dollars and enhanced customer satisfaction by factors exceeding 90 percent.

A Different Kind of Enterprise

Business transformation does not just change processes, it changes everything. Transformation entails driving out the non-value-adding work that is the root cause of contemporary performance problems by rethinking the fundamental assumptions that underlie how work is performed. As a rule, jobs in high-performance processes are more broadly scoped, more complex, more team-based, and more autonomous than conventional jobs. These people will therefore need to be managed in new ways: through new metrics, new reward systems, new career paths, and the like. The emergent role of the cross-functional process owner, responsible for the design and performance, but not the people, assumes enormous significance. The end result of all these changes is a different kind of enterprise.