BPI and Process Adaptability Improvement

In modern times, the Business Rules are changing every day. Every Business, be it a Product or a Service, changing its way of doing business to suit the customer expectations has become the rule of the day. Technology has become the enabler for the businesses to reinvent their offerings as well as their operations.

Businesses no longer talk about Customer Satisfaction. The bench mark has been set to ‘Customer Delight’ and ‘Custom Made Product/Service Offering’ to every customer.

Levis for example offers custom made jeans for individual customers who can choose from amongst the styles and design that is best suited to them and the individual piece will be made to order and delivered by the Company. So is the case with luxury retailers as well as service providers like Airlines etc.

Take the case of Dell, they have built their entire system in a way as to enable the customers to build their own configuration and order the computers as per individual requirement. The backend process is adaptable to start building the machine as per the order and deliver within the committed time.

To be able to offer and attempt such individual attention to the Customer’s order, the internal operations have got to be geared up to deliver the same. The backend process has got to be flexible and adaptable to accommodate such orders and ensure perfect delivery of service or product. It is not only the process that should be adaptable and flexible, the management has got to build in the flexibility factor through empowerment of their teams and build a culture that is conducive for such operations.

Recognizing process flexibility to be an important factor in business operations, the Business Process Improvement experts advise the BPI project teams to include this factor as one of the measurement criteria along with process effectiveness and process efficiency measurements.

Business Process measurements can be easily determined to gauge and measure process efficiency as well as effectiveness. When it comes to measuring process adaptability, it becomes slightly difficult to apply direct measurement criteria to measure the performance during the process. However the process adaptability can be measured by recording the number of deviations or customer special orders received and serviced as well as through the customer feedback.

In the present times the need for the business processes to be adaptable has become the need of the day. In a market where competition is intense, the differentiation of a product offering or a service offering can be made by accommodating Customer specific needs and requests.

Especially in the case of service industry like Restaurants, Hotels, Airlines and Spas etc, it is the individual attention and care show to cater to every individual customer has become the need of the day.

Such services have got to build their processes that ensure that every customer’s individual need is anticipated and effort is made to exceed the customer’s expectation as a normal part of the business process and not as a specific effort on the part of the management or operations.

In businesses where the process adaptability is recognized as one of the key factors, the BPI project would have to focus on measuring the process on this parameter and improve the process adaptability to keep changing as per the business needs.

Process adaptability should become a routine and not a special requirement in day to day outlook towards business and customers.