How Process-Oriented Organisations are able to achieve Continuous Improvement

All great brands have this one thing in common – robust processes. Customers and clients experience fewer deviations in dealing with such brands. Employees of such organisations exhibit high confidence in dealing with clients and customers. Operational glitches are rare and quickly resolved. They can adapt to small and big environmental changes more easily than others. SOP consultants - Your Retail Coach (YRC) explains further how process orientation helps organisations stay on the hunt for kaizen continuous improvement.

Confidence and Sense of Ownership

People tend to avoid or procrastinate doing tasks that they think to be difficult. The outcome of such an attitude is a lack of confidence in executing assigned duties and responsibilities. The sense of process ownership also goes missing. This is an area in which organisations with well-defined processes outperform their counterparts with poor operations frameworks. Having well-defined processes provides a comprehensive view of what needs to be done with all the critical operational details covered. Knowing the process journey gives genuine confidence. It helps employees assume ownership of their duties and responsibilities. This confidence and sense of process ownership richly contribute towards building a culture of continuous improvement.

Consistency in Work and Output

Lack of consistency in work and output results from both individual and organisational reasons. It is not worthwhile to even think of achieving continuous improvement without consistency in actions and results. While reasons that emanate from individual or personal reasons could be many and diverse the duty of organisations is to ensure that their process management does not leave the scope of generation of inconsistencies in operations. Process-oriented organisations do not rely solely on the skills and expertise of individual employees but their strength is focused on having the right systems for executing business processes and operations. The ability of an organisation to consistently generate uniform process performance and output helps to bring gradual process improvements. If performance and results keep on varying under the same set of conditions, it is challenging to make alterations in the equations.

Lesser Mistakes and Deviations

Mistakes and deviations in the execution of business processes and operations are common. However, beyond an acceptable limit such aberrations are counter-productive to organisations. This echoes the spirit of Six Sigma continuous improvement. Having strong process Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) ensures that the focus is only on what needs to be done and nothing else. This significantly reduces the chances of mistakes and deviations paving the way for continuous improvement. Process planning also provides a window to identify areas that are vulnerable to mistakes and deviations. Without business process management, organisations remain susceptible to ending up with working systems marred with deviations, mistakes, and even blunders.

Higher Adaptability

Environmental changes often force organisations to change their operations frameworks. From time to time, various internal and external changes necessitate varying adjustments in operations. Change as a measure of preparedness and adaptability for the future can also be pre-emptive. Irrespective of the cause of change, improvement and adjustments in operations planning cannot take place in poorly planned working systems. A process-driven working environment gives an opportunity to measure, review, compare, and identify the scope of improvisations. Such adaptability and the ability to improvise are core to the essence of continuous improvement.  

Improved Value Delivery

The quality of value propositions delivered to customers, clients, or beneficiaries depends on the quality of operations maintained by value chain partners. Even one broken link in the value chain can adversely and irrecoverably affect the final quality of the value proposition delivered. Weaknesses in operations planning and implementation do not align with the principles and practices of continuous quality improvement. The latter seeks to eliminate weaknesses in operations planning over time. Process orientation is crucial for organisations to detect flaws in their processes towards course correction. Detecting deviations is much easier in a defined working environment. These efforts and improvisations applied over time are the hallmarks of continuous improvement.

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