18 Questions to Help You Improve Business Processes

Lean is a philosophy to continuously identify and eliminate waste within an organisation, where waste is defined as any activity that does not, from the customer’s perspective, add value. Fundamentally the Lean Philosophy is about continuous process improvement to create a business that optimally responds to customer demand.

While all business managers will recognise that the above statement is somewhat obvious, the real question is how does one actually go about improving processes?

Firstly, what are business processes? Business processes are ‘how we do things’, including, for example processing sales orders, drafting customer quotes or proposals, credit checking, generating a production schedule, placing purchase orders, generating invoices, creating reports, machining a component and assembling a product. Within any such process, there will always be an element of waste, where

“Waste is all Non-Value Added Effort, i.e. any activity that the Customer is not prepared to pay for…….but often has to!”

In order to improve any operational process and provide greater customer value, the process first needs to be understood, and the easiest way to understand a process is by drawing or mapping it. Mapping aims to create an end-to-end “picture” of the process…..A picture is worth a thousand words. Creating a visual picture of the process allows one to determine where customer value is being added, and then, by using the 18 Questions, identify the non-value added activities that may be reduced or eliminated to improve the process.

While there are many types of maps and charts, the simplest to use is Process Flow Chart that depicts the flow and interaction between tasks or operations, e.g. the customer order process at a local distribution company is shown below.

Once the process has been mapped and understood, areas of waste can usually be identified by asking one or more of the following 18 Questions, i.e.

18 Questions for Process Improvement

1. Why is this task necessary and why is it being done by this person/department?
2. Can we re-arrange the physical layout of the department/office/shop etc, to reduce the amount of movement and facilitate the flow of goods/information?
3. Can we eliminate, simplify or combine this task with another?
4. Is this task actually adding customer value or is it something “we have always done”?
5. Why does this task take so long?
6. What rules govern the process and completion status, and why?
7. Can we group these people/departments/tasks together?
8. Are we giving the customer what he really wants or only what is available, or perhaps even worse, what we have always provided?
9. Is this report necessary, understood, and what is it used for?
10. What metrics will allow us to improve the process or customer value?
11. Why do these tasks result in process errors?
12. How can we reduce or eliminate variation or processing errors?
13. Are we manually entering the same data in different systems and can we eliminate duplicated information by improved IT systems?
14. Can we use new technology to improve the process or provide greater stakeholder value?
15. How can we improve the stakeholder's experience by reducing the time from beginning to delivery?
16. When pressed for time, what steps in the process are skipped or worked around?
17. Are we using accounting systems that require excessive time to produce management reports which may then result in poor decision making using ‘out-of-date’ information?
18. Are costs being allocated in a manner that adds value to the decision making process?

The classic Deming PDCA improvement cycle is often used as powerful tool in conjunction with the 20 Questions to ensure all improvements are carried out in accordance with a well organized and defined methodology.

Also check out our related posts:

The 5 "WHYS": Getting to the Root of A Problem Quickly

The Cause and Effect Analysis Using the Fishbone Diagram

Brainstorming

Kaizen: Gaining the Full Benefits of Continuous Improvement

To your greater success,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.