The Process Approach

This week I have been mostly thinking about processes. Take a look at the attached diagram.

The highlighted flow in fig 2. would in a functional organisation traverse through several ‘departments' or spheres of control e.g. Sales, Purchasing, Planning, Production etc. ISO 9000:2000 requires the adoption of the process approach. I wondered have businesses that have adopted the process approach merely drawn the processes as they go through each ‘department' or function without altering the way the organisation is structured. Or have businesses ripped up the organisational structure and used the opportunity to fully adopt the process approach. e.g. no functions, no departments, no titles, just processes...

Regards,
Simon

Simon,

We have not been as radical as having no functions / titles or departments.

We have however adjusted our structure quite significantly (still a little way to go but seems to be positive so far).

We used to have traditional Design, Sales, Production scheduling, Production, Warehouse, Transport 'demarcation' for want of a better word - Accounts fits in there somewhere.

We now have new business department (old design, estimating, technical & external sales).

Then we have Customer Services (Old internal sales & accounts),

Then resource management (old planning and part of production - materials control, services to machines, warehouse & despatch ), then manufacturing.

Hard to explain but it has refocused the business for the better

Regards

Richard

Hi Richard,

It sounds like the walls have tumbled down somewhat and you've had a good go! I'm sure it helped to get ‘buy in' to the process approach - you know ‘we are actually doing something different.' A Total Process Organisation (TPO) (hey - have I invented a new quality acronym?) would not be easy to accomplish especially in an established organisation.

Wouldn't it be fantastic though to have the opportunity of ripping up the rule book and starting again from scratch. I wonder if anyone has been brave enough to go the whole TPO®.

Regards,
Simon

Wouldn't it be fantastic though to have the opportunity of ripping up the rule book and starting again from scratch.  I wonder if anyone has been brave enough to go the whole TPO®.

Simon,

Had/have the similar 'thing' here.

It was when I was looking at this years audit plan that I realised something was a little 'wrong'.

As we are trundling down the path of TS I have spent a fair amount of time digesting what is required and then makig it quite simple.

I have to say I look at processes from 25 000 feet, some others look at the macro level.

We do not have departments, just responsibilities. Refer to my manual of the past.

Adopting processes here was easy as that was how the business ahs operated since its inception 32 years ago!! However the documentation has been lagging behind quite a bit. In fact it was probably compromised by the delights of 9k94.

Things are rather easy here as we only have the one main process - injection moulding, everything else is a support.

Process improvement can be bad for business!

A bold statement but sometimes making a change to improve an individual process can have a detrimental impact on another often tenuously related process within the system - by tenuously related I mean not a direct customer or supplier process.

A while back I remember being at meeting where we were looking for solutions to a long standing process problem, we thought we had all the bases covered and were well on the way to implementing an agreeable solution. Some days later a curve ball arrived from an unexpected source to completely kibosh the idea.

Process improvement is vital but systems understanding is imperative.

Regards,
Simon

Process flow I have sorted, everything is still in departments (Makes it easier to audit) but each department has been seperated into the processes that take place there.

The problem I have is KPIs, Our auditor has told me to attach them to the process flow, but I still don't 100% understand what they are!!

Anyone help with a blonde description of a KPI and how to figure out what ours are?

Nadine

Nadine,

Metrics is the other flavour at present as many people (including me) got all confused with KPI's.

Basically, you have a process, therefore you can measure it. If you can measure it what does it achieve and is this achievement what you want, ie a process is 75% efficient (please note everyone I am talking generally here) and you wish it to be 90. Thats your target. If you wish to put an action plan in place to achieve your target for the KPI, that is an objective!!

We use scrap, reject(two different things!!), tool change time, customer complaints and cycle time as our KPI's.

We are a moulding company.

Hope that helps, it has been the end of a few intense days, so I have probably completely missed the point

Off to get my eardrums blown by my favourite band.

There's a good article on the web site:

A Practical Guide to Designing the Process Approach

Scroll down to:

Link processes, measures and procedures

For measures substitute KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).

Regards,
Simon

Thank you very much, I can now sort out my KPI's, our auditor will be impressed with me.

Nadine.x

SAM,
attached is a visual that I have used to communicate process in relation to system.
The auditors who viewed this visual indeed got the big picture regarding process auditing.
Wallace.