BPM: From Improvement to Excellence and to Improve again

The main objective of BPM, as model to guide its business process management of a company, is found permanently immersed in a cycle of continuous improvement. When a business process is improved so that is no longer possible to make further improvements to it, we can say we have achieved excellence, and is a fully optimized process. At this point, we might think that if our business process is optimal, why not abandon or relax the improvement activities cost savings, since you cannot find any improvement?

It is a well-known that the improvement should always be done continuously, but why? Why cannot improve a business process to achieve excellence, let it fully optimized and give the work terminated?: Because the world changes. Because the company, people, systems, products, services, ultimately the whole world, changes, evolves, is dynamic.

Companies that are not immersed in a cycle of continuous improvement and ultimately in a continuous evolutionary process, are doomed to extinction, since the differences with the other companies in your industry growing business will be larger, and reach a time the competition will have much more optimized processes and will not compete with them. There is only one scenario in which the lack of investment in improved cost no life: when all companies behave the same sector, without investment in improvement (this type of scenario presents great opportunities and risks both for obvious reasons). In times of economic crisis perfectly identify companies with processes close to excellence; they are those ones that survive (natural selection).

When we know our business process is excellent?, You may never get to know, because that would know for sure that today is not possible to make the process better, and therefore no company from our competition is doing better. And in any case, what it would know that the process is excellent, if tomorrow you may see a new technology, product, service, etc. .. to allow my process can be improved and therefore is no longer good?.
But we can sense when a process is not great and / or is too far from optimal. To improve is needed to measure. Before submitting any improvement action, I must know what aspects I want to improve and for this I set the basic parameters of the process of my business I want to measure and transmit me the information I needed to guess if my process is improved. It is what we call business process indicators (KPIs). Two typical examples may be the unit cost and manufacturing time. If the information obtained from these monitoring, I gather enhancements, I get bad indicators, or worse, I compare the indicators of competition and comparison that is not favorable to my company, the process can be improved, otherwise it may be optimal or close to excellence (buy only today, tomorrow certainly is not).

In either case, whether my process is optimal or not is should I continue improvement activities, and when I get my process to optimize and achieve excellence, I must continue to improve because, who says me that tomorrow there is not a new supplier in China that offers me 50% of supply cost that I'm buying now equal or better quality, or who can say me that my competition doesn’t wins market share because he has managed to have better business processes than mine?

BPM provides a great opportunity to streamline and facilitate the improvement to be excellent today, and to continue improving to remain the better tomorrow.

Raúl Gualberto Tinoco

IT Senior Consultant

rgualberto@yahoo.es

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