High-Yield Methods - Customer aligning business strategies, process and technology

Customer-aligning business strategy, process and technology

OFFICE PROCESS DESIGN

Do you know that manufacturing workers represent less than 10% of all U.S. employees? Pretty shocking. What about the rest? Some are in agriculture, some in construction, some on fishing boats—but the preponderance of the remaining 90% work in either back office or front office jobs at levels ranging from janitor right up to CEO. And what’s also very shocking is that we’re applying over 90% of our process attention to less than 10% of the work force—while paying little or no attention to office process.
What are the principle differences between office and manufacturing work and workers? Let’s take a look.

Office Environments	Manufacturing Environments
Low repetition	High repetition
Decision-based business process	Fixed business process
Adaptability critical	Consistency critical
Hundreds of key workflows	Dozens of key workflows
80 - 90% of defects up at workflow level	Majority of defects down at work process level
Majority of work activities interdependent	Many work activities independent
Invisible defects	Visible defects
Empowered staff	Compliant staff
Resist “external” input	Accept “external” input
Business process is the work	Business process guides the work
Fully joined workflow & information flow	Largely detached workflow & information flow
High dependence on varied application software	High dependence on ERP software

After reviewing the chart, would you think a manufacturing based process approach would work in the office? Almost certainly not. But when companies do pay attention to office process, they keep on trying to pound square pegs into round holes. Manufacturing process folks just drag in Six Sigma or Lean. The former typically does more damage than good in highly variable office environments. The latter doesn’t cause so much damage, but doesn’t deliver much value either, because it has no information flow or automation design components, which are indispensable for redesigning office work.

When companies that do pay attention to office process don’t drag in a manufacturing approach, they use “generic process,” the least common denominator of all process approaches. Unfortunately, generic process design barely scratches the surface of highly complex, cross functional office workflow and information flow and does worse with individual work process. Companies don’t get far applying generic process in manufacturing, why would they expect to do better in office environments, which are actually more complex? That would take several book chapters to answer.

Suffice it to say that the consequences of deficient office process practices are extreme. They include office overstaffing, work quality problems, excess work cycle time and inability to define technology requirements before technology is purchased and implemented. In fact, the sum of these consequences can easily exceed, and by a large margin, the cost of poor manufacturing process.

How do companies remedy this problem, when the process tools at their disposal don’t work? An excellent alternative is HYM-originated VISUAL WORKFLOW. We designed VW from the ground up to turn office process problems into opportunities to vastly improve performance while reducing office “overhead” costs.
We’ve applied VW to help clients from Fortune companies to small businesses improve office process for over ten years now. We’ve certainly refined and expanded it over those years, but the basic concept worked from the get-go and keeps on working.

For more about VISUAL WORKFLOW follow this link. To download a comprehensive white paper describing VW, click here.