Teaching business process improvements - Making the right choice

Abstract

A significant question in today's competitive market that has direct business ramifications is how to assess the impact of business improvement projects and information technology changes before a commitment is made since an impact assessment can affect expectations of yield, return and quality improvements. Projects are often started without the baseline measures needed to asses the degree of improvement. More importantly, the ranking and impact assessment is often completely subjective. While subjective impact is important, it needs tempering with simple but more objective methods. Current approaches used to measure the performance of the business relate to processes, such as dashboards of metrics, value chain performance, and value-management that all focus on the operational results rather than the processes are at the heart of the question. None of them provide preliminary insight or an assessment of which processes that should be improved, where the largest return is related to the larger risk or what will provide the greatest corporate impact for the least amount of investment or risk. There are few known business techniques or analytics that provide the insight required to assess the most significant business improvements prior to making that choice. Most analysis includes both qualitative and quantitative elements. Together, they provide the foundation for reasonable decision-making with regard to the situation being examined. Business processes are a series of actions or operations of producing something. The attributes of a business process can be either descriptive or quantitative. Businesses usually use one or more of these attribute(s) or metrics to represent the performance of the process (i.e. cycle time, inventory turns, and ratios of various sorts). Requirements for process improvement are statements supporting the need to change the actions within the process to improve its overall performance. This is a form of general requirements analysis. While some believe there is no way to generally analyze an enterprise others have examines some techniques to do so (Kowalkowski and McElyea). This paper will provide a step-by-step approach to examine and assess current business processes using a context based assessment method that allows you to understand the implications of changing the processes from various business perspectives. These context based methods also require some descriptive analytics to manipulate the working models. They provide a focused way to improve business processes based on requirements while examined the impact of the proposed changes to the business processes. Coupled with some quantitative measures, they can provide a means of assessing both return and risk. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2006.