BPI – Introduction to Process Measurement

Business Process Improvement project happen to be the most effective tool to bring in effective process and operating efficiencies in any field of business operations. Organizations use BPI programs to overhaul the existing processes, remove redundancies and to adapt to the changing demands and conditions of the Customers.

As the business environment keeps changing and evolving, the Customer expectations as well as the operating conditions of the business keeps changing as well.

There exists a need for all business organizations to keep working to improving their internal processes to keep up with the changing environment and thereby maintain the efficiencies required to meet with customer expectations as well as operations optimization.

The starting point of the BPI exercise happens to be the formation of Executive Implementation Team that comprises of the Senior Management and the Business Unit Heads who hold the responsibility of being the sponsors of the program and provide the necessary resources and budgetary sanctions. The second main responsibility that the team holds is to choose the process that is to be addressed and revamped through the BPI program.

Under the EIT team come the PIT Leader and the PIT Team that will take on the executive responsibility of the project. The PIT leader then starts with working on the process that has been chosen.

Preparing for BPI exercise involves detailed process mapping and creating the block diagram for the said process after discussing in detail with the operations teams and floor walk through. The block diagram is then fine tuned to mark the boundaries thus freezing the beginning point and the ending point of the chosen process.

Further planning involves marking the source of inputs that go into the said process, identifying the input source as well as the output customers at intermediate and final stages of the process.

Detailed examination of the data that is received as input, the data or deliverable that is required to be sent as output from the process would have to be done to ensure every possible detail is captured.

At this point it becomes necessary to examine the input and output data accuracy, errors, frequency and standardization of the data as well as to record the customer expectations from the process.

Once entire process mapping and overview has been completed and defined, the next logical step would be to tabulate the measurements and targets for the overall process. This measurement would then help the project team to focus on improvement of the process. Though the criteria for measurement could be several and exhaustive, it would be advisable to limit the criteria to few basic process measurements namely effectiveness, efficiency and adaptability.

At this point it is important to understand and appreciate the need for process measurement.

Measurement of the process As It Is becomes the starting point to work out the process improvement and goals.

Mapping existing level of the process gives us the reference point or the base to work towards further improvement.

Once the current processes performance has been ascertained and mapped, the process can then be managed, controlled and improved using the BPI techniques.