Process excellence and performance turnaround can be regarded as synonyms.
Process Excellence is renowned for its ability to improve business processes and thus company results. Business Process Management (BPM) and Continuous Improvement methodologies, assist companies to increase their process capabilities and innovation success rates.
Process Excellence has entered the realm of business turnaround through its ability to facilitate the development of a clear path to success.
In essence, turnaround is about creating a new vision, strategy and aligning the company’s processes and resources to deliver on new objectives. Usually, the focus with a turnaround is about productivity improvement, cost management, cash generation, and facilitating growth.
With Process excellence and performance turnaround a typical first step is to identify and prioritize low-hanging fruits for performance improvement and align scarce resources to execute these for speedy results.
Alongside an internal due diligence exercise – Voice of the Business (VOB), when looking at turning around a loss-making company, the leadership should seek to understand what their customers really want – Voice of the Customer (VOC). We all know that the customer is king and that any successful business knows what its customers’ current and future needs are.
Through Process excellence and performance turnaround, highly successful companies have aligned their processes and resources to create value that satisfies those customers’ needs appropriately. Appropriately means not overdoing things and so wasting money, but also never underdoing things which will result in loss of market share.
Process excellence and performance turnaround guide the gathering and analyzing of the VOC while measuring the company’s internal process and its capability to deliver on what the customer wants.
This sets the foundation for a tactical plan that will drive the turnaround efforts.
Performance Turnaround with Process Excellence Tools
Through a filtration mechanism, the VOC and associated opportunities, are prioritized.
Once the company’s tactics are defined, objectives can be crystallized and several project ideas developed to bring about the desired performance turnaround. These ideas include processes, systems, resources, measures, etc.
These ideas are entered into the filtration mechanism and prioritized against the company’s key objectives.
Project ideas are typically categorized into productivity improvement, growth & innovation, and cash generation, for example. Of course, these categories should suit the company and its strategic objectives.
Experienced Process Excellence personnel can assist the leadership team to bring about swift yet sustainable improvement while laying a platform for future growth through innovation projects.
What makes process excellence so powerful in business turnaround situations is that it drives decisions based on reality. That is, taking what we have (resources) and deploying it to achieve results most efficiently through correctly prioritized interventions. Subjectivity is forgone leaving objectivity to decide the course of action.
Because of its focus on measures, progress can be monitored at various levels within an organization, and quick interventions are launched when processes, systems, or resources stray from course.
Process Excellence not only facilitates improvement or innovation, but its control mechanisms and governance system also ensure continuous process excellence.
AchieveProcessExcellence.com offers Process excellence and performance turnaround solutions to move businesses into a higher, more profitable gear.
