Your organization needs processes for:

• Designing efficient and effective work processes to meet all key requirements, including incorporating new technology, organizational knowledge, product excellence, and the need for agility
• Determining and meeting key process requirements
• Managing your supply chain including evaluating supplier performance
• Improve processes to achieve better performance, reduce variability, and improve products and services

Best practices to consider:

• Process thinking is a cultural attribute of the organization.
• Every key process and its key requirements has been identified, the processes have been mapped, in-process and end-of-process measures have been identified, and data from these measures are analyzed and used to continuously improve the processes.
• Supply chain management involves suppliers in improving quality and cycle time.

Common problem areas:

• When problems occur, people look at who to blame rather than where a process failed.
• The organization has never tried to identify its key processes or determine their requirements.
• No systematic approaches are in place to manage and improve key processes.
• Few in-process measures are taken and few end-of-process measures are used to improve performance.
• Suppliers are not treated as partners to assist in reaching your organization’s goals and objectives.

To read more about process management, click on these articles:

• Smart Question #1: What’s the Process?
• The Benefits of Process Thinking
• Ask What, Not Who
• What Process-Centered Looks Like
• 3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes
• Keys to Successful Process Improvement

The Process Management Category asks how you design your work systems and how you design, manage, and improve your key work processes. The best way to evaluate how well you do this is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve process management, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:

1. How do you design and innovate your overall work system (how the work of your organization is accomplished)?
2. How do your work systems and key work processes (your most important internal value creation processes) relate to and capitalize on your core competencies?
3. What are your key work processes?
4. How do you determine the key requirements for these processes and what are they?
5. How do you design and innovate your work processes to meet these requirements?
6. How do you ensure that the day-to-day operation of these processes meets their key process requirements?
7. What are the key performance measures and in-process measures used to control and improve these processes?
8. How do you control the overall costs of your work processes and prevent defects, service errors, and rework?
9. How do you improve your work processes to improve performance, reduce variability, and improve products, services, programs, and/or outcomes?
10. How are work process improvements and lessons learned shared with other units and processes to drive learning and innovation?

To read the world-class responses of Baldrige Award recipients to these questions, click here and then click on the award application summary you wish to review. Go to Category 6, Process Management, to learn how the organization embeds a process model.

To learn more about process management, click on these articles:

• Identifying Key Work Processes
• 3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes
• The Process Matrix
• 5 Powerful Process Questions
• The Power of Process
• My Personal Baldrige: Process
  

In-process measures track the performance of a process as it is unfolding, providing real-time feedback that can be acted upon without waiting for the process to end, at which point end-of-process or outcome measures tell you the results of that process. In a perfect world, in-process measures align with end-of-process measures. Most of the results in Category 7 of a Baldrige application are for end-of-process measures. The alignment allows an organization to predict how it will perform on those end-of-process measures and fix problems during the process to get better results.

You can pick any result in any Category 7 Item, identify the process or processes that produce that result, and determine the in-process measures that will predict that result. For example, on-time delivery of a product or service is a common end-of-process metric. In-process measures that predict your performance on on-time delivery might include time to enter an order in the system, time to produce a product or service, and time to deliver that product or service to the customer. The time it takes for every step in the process can be measured and these in-process measures will predict your performance on on-time delivery.

The Baldrige Criteria ask about in-process measures in two places:

• 4.1a1: How do you select, collect, align, and integrate data and information for tracking daily operations?
• 6.2b1: What are your key performance measures or indicators and in-process measures used for the control and improvement of your work processes?

You will also need to understand in-process measures to respond to Criteria questions about how sensitive your performance measurement system is to rapid or unexpected changes (4.1a3), your organization’s ability to respond rapidly to changing needs and challenges (4.1b), how you control costs and minimize defects (6.2b2), and how you improve your work processes (6.2c).

But that’s not the first step. The first step is to move from a functional perspective to a process orientation, at which point identifying, tracking, and acting upon in-process measures will help you control and improve your work processes.

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