How to make your business process customer-centric
Everyone knows that the customer is king and that business processes must deliver what customers want. But how do you do that?
The 10 Steps to Business Process Improvement can help keep the focus on the customer or customer. It starts with the development of the definition of scope (step 2) where you identify the customer and what they want from their business process. Tea customer is someone outside your company paying for your goods or services; tea customer is your internal customer if you work as an internal consultant within your company. Employees find it easy to identify the external customer, but they find it more difficult to identify the customer because they have become so used to working to please their boss. After all, the boss rewards your performance and controls your salary increases. Even though your boss is No Your client!
Another way to keep the customer at the forefront is to note, as you map the process in step 3, how often (or more likely, how infrequently) the activities in your process touch the customer. Then, as you work to improve the business process (step 6), check each activity to determine if it adds value to the customer. If it doesn’t add value, delete the activity. Ask yourself if the customer would pay for a particular step in the process if they knew it existed. This will force you to think about the steps in your process from the customer’s perspective, and since each activity contributes to cycle time (step 4), you should optimize the process as much as possible. You can also think of cycle time as either the elapsed time or the total time it takes from the first step of the process to the last step, including the wait time. Cycle time is what customers “see” and they always want it to be as short as possible.
Include customer needs as you develop metrics (step 7) to measure the effectiveness of your business process. Ask them if you are measuring what matters to them. You may not be! Tailor your metrics to focus on what’s most important to your customers.
When developing your continuous improvement plan (step 10), remember to think about how often you will review customer needs, eg every 6 months, 12 months, etc. Be sure to follow the schedule you set.
You can see how easy it is to keep the customer in mind. I’ve already covered how to include them in six of the ten steps for business process improvement.
Copyright 2010 Susan Page
