Information Availability is half the battle in Business Process Improvement!

First, it is the availability of information itself, in a central, easily accessible way, that can speed up Business Processes by an order of maginitude!

Measurement and reporting of Performance Measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) themselves help Business Process Improvement. In many cases, these performance measure information is not readily available for actionable improvement efforts.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the extensive use of the Internet to stitch together, many different systems within the same company, as well as systems of suppliers, and service providers, have bridged the Information Availability Gap to a large extent. If organizations have not done this as yet, it is well worth looking into.

Lean Six Sigma and other Process Improvement practitioners often overlook the availability of information itself to speed up, eliminate, do in parallel, many of the steps in a business process. Instead of a sequential approach to two steps in a process, may be one person can do both of them in one single step, if information needed to do it is available easily. In some cases, approvals for some action can be taken immediately and the end user served by default. If subsequent analysis of the information reveals adverse information, the decisions can be undone. In some countries, they assume that Applicants for a Passport do not have adverse information in their background checks. Their applications are approved by default. If anything adverse comes up in a follow up analysis, the passport is revoked! This way 99% of the citizens who have a clean security record are not delayed by Police or Security checks for handling the other 1% properly!

Information Availability, especially when it comes to Performance Measures or KPIs, is indeed a problem in many business processes. Information systems such as ERP systems evolved, and developed to automate functional areas like Finace, Marketing, Sales, Manufaturing, Warehousing and Logistics. They were not designed with end-to-end business processes like Order-To-Cash processes in mind. Consequently, many of them don't even capture timestamps with great detail if you want to analyze Turn-Around Time (TAT) metrics! Databases just record at the most, the date and time when a table was modfied, and not any more details on the action was just performed. In practical terms, it becomes somewhat impossible to get information about TAT metrics in business processes! Information Availability about Performance Measures is not to be taken lightly. Efforts to improve this aids Process Improvement.

Information Availability is not very high on Process Excellence folks' aganda. That may precisely be the first thing to explore if you want to get a lot of mileage out of your own improvement efforts!

Information about the package is as important as the package itself. - Fred Smith, CEO, Fedex

Whether it is the Factory Floor, or a Customer Service or Support Center, helping customers with their orders or help regarding anything, the amount of time wasted looking for things is amazing! Any lean improvement project has to look at this waste and come up with ways to eliminate them. This can cut a big chunk out of the costs of operation.

On the factory floor, there are techniques like the 5S Methodology that will reorganize tools and other materials used on the factory floor so that no time is wasted looking for them. These can be organizing tools where we may need them, drawing shapes of the tools on the board where it is stored so that you can get the tool back to where it needs to be after doing the work.

On the software side, many creative techniques can be used to realize more or less, the same kinds of waste reduction. In software systems, a lot of time is wasted looking for a customer, an order or a document regarding an insurance policy, premium or claim. Many, many different ways of locating the information you need in your own software systems could be provided so that you can locate these things you are looking for quickly.

Partial field values, common spelling mistakes could all be supported in the software system. If you are searching for "Peterson", allowing for searches for "Pete", "Peter". "Pieter" pulling up the record for "Peterson" along with others could help the agent quickly locate the customer, order or other things the agent is looking for quickly.

Fifteen years ago, term indexing and search technology was not mature enough for these kinds of searches to be implemented in software easily without every company developing these components from scratch. These days there are many indexing and search software packages that can be incorporated into your own software that there is no excuse for not including them in comprehensive ways. These kinds of insights are rarely talked about during Requirements Gathering phases of such software development but they should be!

Reduction of wasted time is a great opportunity for Business Process Outsourcing services providers. They are always looking for Business Transformation possibilities while they take up responsibility for delivering a Business Process as a service. Since many of them are also IT vendors in addition to being IT-Enabled Services (ITES), this is a great win-win on all sides by making the BPO payoff with associated IT projects also!

There is Gold in them Thar Business Processes. You can get to it by eliminating wasted time looking for things!

You're searching, Joe, for things that don't exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings -- there are no such things. There are only middles - Robert Frost

Process Improvement has never been more important or more needed during tough times. The kicker may be the lack of funds to take up new efforts at this time when budgets are pared to the bone. However, surveys of Fortune 500 CIOs the past few years have shown Business Process Improvement to be the #1 priority for the majority of them! Hope they still mean i, for their own sakes!

Process Improvement that leads to cost cutting has a very attractive value proposition at this time and could be taken up in earnest by many companies. Cutting out waste in effort and time leads to less resources being needed to accomplish the same quantum of tasks, and that's a very compelling thing to sell during these tough times.

Process Improvement has never been more important to Outsourcing and Offshoring service providers than at this time. Many companies are renegotiating their contracts with their service providers because of the recession. In some cases, they are asking for a Per Transaction pricing rather than a Full Time Equivalent (FTE) kind of contract pricing.

Service providers, especially offshore providers have thrown people at the problem to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in contracts. Now that the topline rates are negotiated down and the margins are shrinking, they may have to pay close attention to every employee's efficiency and effectiveness and cannot afford to have more people than needed. When contracts are based on per transaction pricing, the pressure to make sure that every efficiency and effectiveness goal of every employee is met is even more pronounced.

Process Improvement has a very compelling need in tough times. Unfortunately, they may not ne taken up because of blanket bans on any new expenditures! Sad, but true in most companies!

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. - Steve Jobs

Continuous Process Improvement, Lean Improvement or Six Sigma efforts can only be as successful or as reliable as the quality of data they use!

Data Quality is a pernicious, persistent and widespread problem in every organization. On the surface, reports look neat, wrapped up, and reliable but quite often the data they rely upon can be of differing quality levels. Even if backend enterprise information systems are all reliable, established and running for sometime, a lot of the Information people use may come from Data that may be from manually generated Excel-Spreadsheet-based Skunkworks Reporting Systems!

There are some simple ways to apply the same techniques you use for Process Improvement that you can use for ensuring Data Quality improvement.

The first of these is to apply the Six Sigma techniques that you use for Process Improvement to improve the quality of data. The first task may be to apply Paretos Law (80/20 rule) to narrow down the key pieces of data that are most important to the process improvement task at hand. For example, in a Business Process, Productivity may be the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that is most important rather than another KPI like Absenteeism or Employee Turnover. Focusing on the Productivity KPI alone and the Data that goes into its calculation may be the way to go.

Not all data are equal. Some data may be more equal than others for your process improvement purposes! Concentrating on only those may be the most pragmatic way to go!

Tracking errors over a period of time in the Data of interest and reducing them to a minimum and more importantly reducing the variation in data quality from period to period may be important. WIld variations in the data quality make the data that much more unreliable.

Once the problematic areas are identified, it makes sense to do Root Cause Analysis on the sources and methods of creation of the data. This could be related to people or technology/software related issues. Figuring out where the root cause of the problem lies goes a long way in fixing the diaease rather than symptoms!

Monitoring Data Quality is important in making sure that your own observations before and after process improvement have validity and reliability, and you are not deluding yourself with faulty data in the first place!

Two men were examining the output of the new computer in their department. After an hour or so of analyzing the data, one of them remarked: "Do you realize it would take 400 men at least 250 years to make a mistake this big ?” - Anonymous

If you're in the mood to travel in March, Shared Services Week 2009 awaits you in Orlando.

• Its key themes include Planning & Launching, Globalized & Multi-functional, Measurement & Process Excellence and more!
• Companies that will be in attendance include BT Group, Washington Gas, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, KPMG, Lego and Kraft Shared Services to name but a few.
• The event's Excellence Awards' deadline isn't until the end of January; see what you can nominate your company for here - http://www.sharedservicesweek.com/awards.php#categories
• Click here to download a full agenda: http://www.sharedservicesweek.com/requestabrochure.php.

BPM Enterprise readers can take advantage of a special registration rate: 30% discount when you quote "BPME" when you register!