How much better do you think your business could be? What if you could deliver more value to your customers, save time and reduce costs, but still deliver a high quality service or product.
At Ascent Management, we help businesses achieve success by aligning the organisation, its processes, and the people and roles they perform so that performance is planned and managed in an integrated way. We call this Process-Based Management and by following simple steps, your business will deliver superior results for those managers seeking to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Before you start managing and improving processes, you need to consider the following:
1. Manage the How
Processes are ‘how’ you provide products and services to your customers. If you do not understand and manage your processes, you are not managing ‘how’ you provide products and services to your customers. It is difficult to get better without a process focus.
2. Focus on the Customer
The interaction with your processes is how customers judge your business. As consumers, we interact with companies every day. You decide which ones are good, and which provide bad service. Bad service is mostly from not understanding and managing processes. Good service is managing your processes to focus on your customer.
3. Requirement of Competition
You need to be able to describe what you are doing as a process. If you can’t, you don’t know what you are doing. Competition requires that we get better and better at what we do. We can only do that by managing and improving our processes.
4. Become an Employer of Choice
As an employee, would you rather work in an organisation where the focus is on managing and improving processes to provide customer value, or where the focus is on managing functions and protecting turf? You know the answer.
We are so used to managing functions, but functions do not provide services to customers: cross functional processes do. Our challenge now is to develop the approaches and structure to better understand and manage our processes. Manufacturing has made great strides in managing processes, it is time for the service sector to follow similar approaches and get better at what we do. If we don’t, our customers will continue to migrate to those providers who give better customer value and experience, by managing their processes.
There are many compelling reasons for a process-based approach to improving business performance. Learn more about how our approach can help you identify the pathway to improving business by taking our two free quick assessments on Process Improvement and Process Based Management
