Process Redesign

Course Description:

Are you a member of a process redesign team and want to learn from experts how to go about understanding and improving your business processes?
Do you understand the major approaches to process modelling so you can select the most appropriate technique for your circumstances?
Can you facilitate a group to produce a model of a business process that clearly shows where the bottlenecks are and makes clear the plan?
Do you want to know how to add meaningful metrics to a process model?
Are you confident that you can identify the core causes of process problems?
Would you find it helpful to see successful and repeatable methods of moving from an understanding of the AS-IS process to a range of TO-BE options?
Do you know how to select between alternative improvement options?

All organisations need to drive processes that exceed expectations and delight customers. This highly interactive and in-depth course gives you the tools and knowledge to make that a reality. We work through a series of structured exercises supported by a detailed case study.

This course provides you with the skills necessary to select and apply appropriate methodologies, tools and techniques for specifying, evaluating, modelling, measuring, cost justifying and redesigning cross functional business processes. This in-depth training introduces the terminology involved, describes the main stages of a process transformation initiative and provides an understanding of the organisational and human dimensions of process redesign.

Often the first and biggest step towards process improvement is to document how current process should operate in order to ensure that all involved understand both how they can individually contribute to success and how their potential non-compliance can have adverse consequences. Having a set of clear, but simply understood, process models is an ideal starting point for establishing a consensus of how we do things and how we could aspire to do things even better.

This course includes the following modules:

The context for business process improvement

• This first session looks at how business processes evolved in our organisations and why we do some of the things we do.
• We briefly examine the major trends in process improvement by looking at the aims of the Total Quality Movement (TQM), Business Process
• Re-engineering (BPR), Cycle Time Reduction (CTR), Six Sigma, Lean thinking and manufacturing.

Identifying business processes

• Definition of a business process
• Differences between the process view and the functional view of an organisation
• Advantages of the process view
• Importance of metrics
• Value chain analysis
• Relationships between processes
• Building an organisational view of processes
• Employ a modelling technique to identify the high level business processes from a detailed case study.

Modelling business processes

• We examine in some detail the various process modelling techniques starting with simple process maps and flow charts, moving on to swim lane diagrams and moving on to more complex activity diagrams.
• In each case we look at modelling notation and conventions.
• Each modelling technique will be individually reinforced through structured exercises and then the whole process will be practiced in a team centred case study.

Adding metrics and analysing process performance

• Once we have a built a model of the as-is business processes that all can agree upon we can go on to add performance metrics, identify problems areas and hotspots
• We introduce and practice a range of problem analysis techniques which will help to identify; inappropriate workflows, handoffs, non-value added and waste activities.
• We go back into case study and add performance measures to the as-is model that we produced.
• We identify and prioritise key areas where improvement could take place and prepare and brief management on our findings and recommendations.

Moving from as-is to to-be

• We introduce techniques to generate process improvement alternatives
• We introduce process design principles and create a range of to-be scenarios
• We look at benchmarking as a means of setting process performance targets and set stretch goals for our process improvement initiative
• We produce a set of to-be process maps; examine the feasibility and organisational risk involved in implementing the preferred solution