Process Mapping Mistakes

Process mapping provides a structural analysis approach and a capability of delivering systematic outputs. But the effectiveness of process mapping is affected by how it is selected as the method of analysis, how it is planned and executed, says contributor Shu-Wing Pang. Here are 4 common ways process improvement professionals go wrong with process mapping. Process mapping is an analytical tool commonly applied by process improvement professionals. By capturing real-world operation and reflecting it through a set of processes, they can, firstly, visualize the inputs, interactions, deliverables and parties involved in an organisation’s operation and decision-making, and secondly, identify process inefficiencies, disjoints and improvement opportunities.

The effectiveness of process mapping, however, varies significantly based on the writer’s experience and observations. On one procurement process reengineering project, for example, process mapping was appropriately applied to summarize core processes and identify non-value-added activities to facilitate

improvement; but on another project, the consultants involved failed to capture the true scale of the operational processes in the organisation and the resultant improvement was unable to address the real underlying problems.

Problem of Ineffective Process Mapping

The following are four common problems which adversely affect the use of process mapping on identifying improvement opportunities. These problems are related to the appropriate use of the process mapping method, how process mapping is planned and executed.

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The quality infrastructure

Introduction

UK businesses need to:

create and enter markets in a timely manner
meet customer requirements, including legislative requirements
manage risks, including risks to financial investment, product introductions, market exclusion, etc.

Underpinning these activities is the need to demonstrate conformance to standards (whether specified by

regulators, the market or the industry) in order to gain market access and gain market confidence in their products and services.



The ‘quality infrastructure’ supports these aims and comprises the physical facilities and the interrelated systems of organizations, structures and people that help organizations to implement quality practices and improve performance.

The principle parts of the infrastructure relate to:

regulation – government, regulators
standards – documentary, physical/ reference, other codified intellectual property
conformity assessment and accreditation
economic operators and their collective representatives
consumers

Overview

The UK quality infrastructure is concerned with the relationships between:

legal requirements contained in regulation and legislation
voluntary standards which define the quality of products and services and the methods of their production
industry practice and the actual solutions provided by business
the market, where the confidence and will to trade is promoted
the accreditation and conformity assessment regimes that provide the evidence and confidence

The UK quality infrastructure is principally made up of a number of separate bodies, each with separate remits but which impact the following:

Market access and international trade – facilitating the removal of technical barriers to trade, evolving common language and practices that promote trade and gaining access to overseas markets
Industrial policy – enabling the UK to take advantage of its strong science base and capacity for innovation to compete in global markets
Regulation – either supporting regulation where there are significant risks to health, safety or the environment, or through market self-regulation
Providing confidence, evidence, information and assurance to purchasers, suppliers and customers regarding the quality of products, services or their supply.
Promoting awareness of and providing training and assistance in quality tools, methods, practices and culture.

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Toyota

What do you get when you mix 1,000 engineers, four weeks of additional product development lead time and reduced reliance on outsourced engineering by 67%? In most product development departments this would get a decision maker quickly fired. Not so for Executive VP Takeshi Uchiyamada, a chief engineer at Toyota tasked with turning the tide on quality issues. Toyota is taking some expensive countermeasures to the root causes that their quality assurance process from the product design and testing standpoint seems to have been cut a bit too close to the bone over the past decade through cost reductions and development time reduction efforts.

According to the Wall Street Journal article Toyota Assigns 1,000 Engineers to Quality Drive :

Toyota Motor Corp. has assigned 1,000 engineers to help analyze quality problems and is extending time devoted



to testing new models by an average of four weeks in an effort to head off glitches before vehicles enter production

Toyota has so far spent about $4 billion to correct the problem of unintended acceleration in its vehicles, but this has been mostly containment and not root cause correction. The changes suggested in this article are aimed more at root causes, and will cost approximately $400 million if we take the cost of 1,000 engineers to be $150 million per year and estimate the cost of 4 weeks of lead time and the reduction in outsourcing to be another $250 million. Could this be a demonstration of the 10X rule of the cost of quality?

Toyota reportedly saved more than $11 billion in the early 2000s thanks to its CCC21 efforts, and some have linked these cost reductions in the design process as well as supply chain costs as contributors to today’s quality problems. Cost reduction should result from following and improving safe, high quality processes that deliver to customer’s expectations. When cost reduction programs put quality before the other KPIs there is a danger that the overall costs increase in the long-run.

Mr. Uchimayada said he would like to reduce the amount of outside engineers working on research and development, but the process will take time. The company must wait for contracts to expire before it can bring the work inside the company. A company executive said the target is 10% outside engineering contractors, down from 30% now.

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Seven Deadly Sins of Business Process Management

Business process management means many things to many people. Just take the words ‘process’ and ‘management’ alone – different people see these quite differently according to their perspective. For many BPM vendors and practitioners alike process management has come to mean process automation. Automation is important but it doesn’t constitute Management. From my perspective Management implies good governance,; each process should be seen as an important asset and therefore owned, understood, correctly applied and improved continuously.

The end goal is improved performance. That improvement may involve automation, but not in all cases. After all – if you look at the activities in your business the vast majority are performed by humans not machines and that’s not going to change any time soon. What irritates me

is that so many of the automation focused tools which purport to offer BPM, offer little capability with respect to Management as I define it above. The result can easily be the automation of processes which are suboptimal, not

properly understood, not properly applied and not continuously improved.

Perspectives: An earlier paper “What BPM Hat are you wearing?” explores the different process perspectives of four main stakeholder groups: End Users, IT, System providers and Risk / Compliance. Access the paper here.
In reality, processes start and end in very different places in the enterprise, often spanning multiple functional areas. There is a risk therefore that process improvement efforts are too narrowly silo’d.  The effect? Different departments fix just their part of a larger process.

It’s difficult to influence what happens either upstream or downstream from that part.  And yet improvement of the full end-to-end flow requires collaboration along the full path.  The failure to achieve such consensus could result in worsened performance, as a fix in one silo could be a retrograde step for another.

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Genius of Steve Jobs

After the news today Apple’s founder and visionary Steve Jobs had passed away aged 56, so much is being said rightly about the technical genius of the man. His profound impact on lives is clear from the global tributes from world leaders, industry luminaries and oft times competitive rivals.

But beyond his astute commercial insight lies a deeper truth, which is much more important to Process Professionals and all us involved in building and developing Process Excellence.



We cannot easily quantify the impact on all of us. To live a life and touch so many people in such a significant way is incredible. What a truly amazing person. I don’t know where I would personally be without my iPhone, iPad and iTunes.

To briefly reflect on his impact in our process world I would like to share three of his key business insights that inspire me. Where did this notion come from? What imperative created this different way of looking at business? How does Apple consistently deliver exceptional performance for their shareholders, customers and employees? Here are some of the insights that I believe Steve Jobs brought to Apple to make it the world-beater it is today:

Insight Number 1: Discern the real need

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

How do you discern the real customer need and not just the want when so often the customer doesn’t know it themselves? Part of this genius is to transcend the customer surveys, research and legions of marketing agencies telling you about customer desires. You need to go beyond that and Steve Jobs did and described a way of thinking through the successful customer outcome and then, only then, align everything you do, through your processes, people and technology to achieving that objective. A collaborator (and sometimes Apple competitor) Jeff Bezos from Amazon describes the process as “working backwards”. He encapsulates the essence of this outside-in view of business “Hey, rather than ask what are we good at, ask who our customers are and what they need. We will figure out how to give it to them.”

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Outsourcing: The Big Lie

Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 22, 2011 — Outsourcing of production and services is the new norm. But in the search for lowest-cost providers, companies often overlook sensible considerations such as total cost, quality, logistics, innovation, and collaborating with partners for mutual prosperity.

John Shook, chairman and CEO of the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), will examine the downside of outsourcing in the opening keynote presentation, “Outsourcing: The Big Lie,” at the Northeast Shingo Prize Conference, Springfield, MA, Oct.5-6, 2011.

“While there are clearly times when outsourcing makes good business sense, academicians and theorists have  inadvertently oversold its benefits without rigorously considering the full consequences,” said Shook.

Lean Management Expert

In 11 years as a manager at Toyota, Shook helped the automaker introduce its lean management system to North America. He is co-author of the groundbreaking workbook Learning to See that introduced value-stream mapping to a worldwide audience and author of Managing to Learn on the A3 management process.

Shook called for developing lean supply chains to end the “madness” in today’s supply Chain during a panel discussion in June at the Rebuilding Japan Conference hosted by business information giant Bloomberg, LP, at the Japan Society in New York City.

Writing in his April 2011 eletter to the Lean Community, titled “Any Color You Want Except Tuxedo Black,” Shook explained the hidden dangers in today’s single sourcing strategies.

Lean in America Theme

The Northeast Shingo conference, with a 2011 theme of “Made Lean in America,” provides education and networking for managers and executives in manufacturing, healthcare, and government.

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Where do we go from here

Since the 2007 publication of Tom Davenport’s book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, businesses have become sold on the notion that they must make use of their data to derive insight. Many organizations have jumped on the analytics bandwagon in recent years. In fact, according to a recent survey by Bloomberg Businessweek, 97 percent of companies with revenues of more than $100 million are using some form of business analytics, up from 90 percent just two years ago.

But while businesses have warmed to the idea of fact-based decision making, a steep learning curve remains. Only one in four organizations believes its use of business analytics has been “very effective” in helping to make decisions. This is a far cry from the competitive edge

promised in all the hype around analytics, clearly raising the question: Is business analytics overrated?

A Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services study, conducted among 930 businesses across the globe in

various industries, provides insight into the current state of business analytics in today’s organizations. It also examines the challenges companies face when using analytics, and explores tactics favored by companies that have succeeded in using analytics more effectively than their peers.

The following are research insights about the current state of business analytics:

Business analytics is still in an “emerging stage.” While business analytics has gone mainstream, most organizations still rely on traditional technology. Spreadsheets are the No. 1 tool used for business analytics.

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Stealing the 7 Secrets

Taizo Ishida (1888-1979) took over the role of President of Toyota from the inventor and founder Kiichiro Toyoda in the midst of labor unrest, layoffs and the threat of bankruptcy.

Ishida is considered the “restorer of Toyota” for good reason in that his business acumen, leadership and what would later be called lean values helped bring Toyota out of its crisis. Ishida shares his secrets of success in the book The 7 Principles of Toyota’s Business Success (トヨタの商売 成功の7原則).

These seven principles are:

1. Establish industry with Japanese minds and skills. In this phrase we see a strong desire to contribute to a positive Japanese trade balance with the world, as well as to develop the nation’s industrial capability. Replace “industry” with your type of business, institution or economic sector and “Japanese” with the people of your own region and you can steal this secret of strong long-term purpose tied to community.



2. Good thinking, good products – creativity and craft. Both of these phrases can be seen with Toyota to this day, unchanged. They have survived for 60 years because they are timeless, pithy and proven to deliver results. Toyota’s business origins were in invention (the automatic loom) a good product from good thinking. The name of Toyota’s kaizen suggestion system is the “creativity and craft” system, which Toyota stole from Ford in 1951. In principle or in practice, this is is a success secret every organization should own.

3. Spirit of country people. There may be a note of local pride or even defiance here, as the region of Toyota’s origin was rural and far from the financial, intellectual or economic center of Japan. No doubt the rural values of hard work, resourcefulness and the lack of unnecessary cultural sophistication in running a successful manufacturing business was a part of this principle. The harried treasure hunter leaves behind what looks suspiciously like large lump of coal. The savvy treasure hunter steals this huge gem.

4. Indomitable fighting spirit – will power. Steal this if you can, beg or borrow it if you can’t, but make it yours and don’t give it back.

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Hybrid Car Hyper

Klaus Doerrzapf, who has solar panels on his home, has no plans for an emission-free car in his garage. He’s one of the reasons why automakers like Nissan Motor Co. won’t recoup investments in electric vehicles anytime soon.

“It’s too early,” the 50-year-old manager at an electrics company said at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt. “Range and price are a problem. Battery life and charging times are also concerns,” Doerrzapf said, while looking at an electric-powered Focus from Ford Motor Co. (F)

Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), Volkswagen AG (VOW) and Nissan partner Renault SA (RNO) talked up their electric vehicles at the Frankfurt motor show as they rolled out a record number

of models and began the search for a return on their development spending. Nissan, the maker of the all-electric Leaf, is investing 4 billion euros ($5.5 billion) together with Renault to build electric cars.



Following the introduction last year of the Leaf, Mitsubishi Motors Corp. (7211)‘s i MiEV, and General Motors Co. (GM)‘s Chevrolet Volt, the new models will test consumer appetite for electric vehicles, which cost more than double the price of conventional models. Consumers are balking at paying up, concerned that their own investment will be wiped out in a few years because the batteries may not last.

“We’re about to find out what happens when several big manufacturers try to sell electric vehicles to real people,” said Ian Fletcher, a London-based analyst with IHS Automotive. “The signs aren’t all good.”
Sales Targets

Nissan has delivered 12,000 of the Leaf model since its introduction in December, Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn said in Frankfurt. PSA Peugeot Citroen, which beat Renault to the market with two electric city cars last December, targeted 7,000 combined deliveries of the iOn and C-Zero models for 2011. It has sold 3,000 since Jan. 1.

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Dedication ceremonies for the new facility are scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday, September 30 in the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s new Inasmuch Foundation Atrium. Guest speakers for the event include Dr. Paul Sieving, Director of the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health; Dr. David Parke II, Executive Vice President and CEO of the

American Academy of Ophthalmology and previously President and CEO of the Dean McGee Eye Institute; Dr. M. Dewayne Andrews, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and Executive Dean of the OU College of Medicine; and the Honorable James Lankford, Congressman from Oklahoma’s Fifth Congressional District.

“This new facility will streamline the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s operations and enhance our multiple missions and programs by bringing them together under one roof,” said Dr. Gregory Skuta, President and CEO of the Dean McGee Eye Institute, and Edward L. Gaylord, Professor and Chair of the OU College of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology. “The tremendous growth of the Institute and our success in recruiting some of the nation’s leading research and clinical talent over the last two decades created crowded conditions and forced us to expand into other facilities. This remarkable new building will foster closer and more effective communication and collaboration as we continue to attract some of the finest minds in the country in vision care and research.”

According to James Tolbert III, chair of the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s Board of Trustees, “DMEI has become a national leader in ophthalmology under a long line of exceptional leaders – including current president, Dr. Gregory Skuta. The Institute’s blend of innovative clinical care, groundbreaking research, superior teaching, and unique administrative structure has made DMEI one of the nation’s premier eye institutes.”

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