Business processes make up an organisation’s structure and significantly impact its overall performance. So, a problem with any of your processes can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks at strategic, tactical, and operational levels.

Lean Process Improvement is the systematic and structured improvement of work practices to enhance productivity, quality, service, and labour productivity by eliminating unnecessary steps and wasted time. It helps you manage your business more efficiently and productively by improving the way you carry out activities.

Lean Process Improvement Steps

Improving your workflow will help you streamline every part of your company, from administration to customer service. By doing this, you take steps to make sure that all errors are reduced, your customers are getting better service, staff have fewer repetitive tasks, process cycle times are decreased, and your business grows. It helps you save money, improve performance and manage risks.

1. Staff Awareness

Employees are an essential component of any business, so if you want to create a productive atmosphere in the organisation, it’s important to communicate your vision clearly and work as a team. Encourage your colleagues to contribute new ideas. Empowering staff to make decisions and changes is key to ensuring that the process is constantly evolving and improving.

2. Business Overview

Without a proper understanding of the processes, you can’t be clear on what you are improving. Define how your business is conducted daily, understand its strengths and weaknesses and identify areas for improvement to make your front and back-office operations more efficient and productive.

3. Process Mapping

Visualising business processes and their interrelationships enables you to analyse, improve and manage the flow of business activity across your organisation. It helps to understand, from the customer’s perspective, which steps are adding value and which are not and makes it easier to identify waste. You can see any restraints and excessive inventory or where the delays are in your process at a glance.

4. Prioritisation

Project selection is the primary and most essential step in the Lean Six Sigma implementation process and the keystone to success in the upfront and longer-term adoption of the methodology. Prioritise and select the most appropriate project according to the data collected.

5. Gathering Data

 Meaningful business change must be based on data to track and measure performance. By analysing the data, you can see which areas need improvement and what is working well. Timely improvement of weak areas is an essential part of lean process improvement.

6. Identifying Key Metrics

Lean metrics include time, cost, and quality. If those indicators are closely monitored, they help identify the cause of the problems and also locate possible areas for improvement. Well-organised metrics are important as they help add value to your business, reduce lead times in the supply chain, improve the quality of products and services, and reduce wasteful things that will lead to unnecessary costs.

7. Delivery

Search for the most profitable solutions to deliver maximum performance to meet or exceed internal and external customer expectations. Understand which operations make it difficult to complete tasks or cause delays, and continually try to find the best way to meet all customer needs without wasting time. Techniques such as DMAIC and PDCA can help you do this.

8. Measure Improvements

Implement innovations one at a time and manage them carefully, monitoring each change. You should be able to determine whether or not it adds value to your process. If the situation has improved, leave this change and move on to implement the next one;  if not, replace it with another until you see the results.

Sometimes doing changes on your own might not lead to the expected results as you may not have enough experience or know-how, especially if something goes wrong. Our process improvement consultants have tremendous experience in delivering Lean Process Improvement and provide consulting, training, and coaching to help analyse, design, and improve your existing business processes. We help you identify waste in your processes and make the improvements that lead to sustained performance results.