Why should Customer Expectations be a consideration in the design of our business processes?
After all, our processes are internal to be managed and developed as the business sees fit.
If we think about Customer Expectations, they include product or service quality, price competitiveness, timeliness of delivery and overall satisfaction. These are all driven by the performance of our processes. High cost processes result in uncompetitive prices; high non-conformance or waste rates are often associated with poor product or service quality; and there are other examples.
We need to design, perform, manage and improve business processes to deliver our customer value proposition and optimise our overall performance.
A key issue is that we tend to manage processes within functional boundaries. This can lead to excellent performance in one functional department, say sales, but well below optimum performance in production where capacity is unmatched to demand. The reverse could also be true.
The secret is to identify the extent of each end-to-end process and manage each stage of the process so that customer needs are met at a sustainable level.
Of course, there is often significant interaction between processes for products and services to be delivered. Customers do not see most of the processes within the organisation, only the product or service output that results. Increasingly, customers become frustrated by poor delivery or service levels which are the result of an invisible process performing badly.
As managers, we should give serious thought to the simple question:
How easy are we to do business with?
Process-based management is concerned with understanding and meeting Customers’ Expectations for products and services from our businesses and making sure that end-to-end processes are monitored, measured and improved so that the overall results for the business are optimised.
If we have a customer-centric approach then we must also have a process-centric approach and this means elevating our thinking about the place of processes in strategy and business model design.
Here’s to a process-focussed week in business.
Peter Westlund
