What do you do if you don’t have the time or know-how to document and improve your processes?

You hire a business process consultant of course!

While we’ve talked endlessly in the past about why processes are important and how to manage your own, hiring a business process consultant lets you reap all the benefits without having to spend an age assessing your organization and talking to every last employee involved.

So, if you want to organize your processes and bring efficiency to your business but don’t have time to do it yourself, read on!

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We’ve all heard about the importance of focusing on one task at a time.

Take that idea, apply it to manufacturing, and you have the concept of one piece flow.

The concept is simple in that you have to limit yourself to working on one item at a time (you only ever have one WIP item). By doing this you can save time and money, as work is performed faster and any space you use is highly optimized.

In fact, it’s the very same concept that Toyota used to reduce the time taken to pack boxes in to help families hit by Hurricane Sandy by 94%.  In total, the aid workers were able to feed 400 more families in less than half the time.

However, there are a few vital things that you need to be careful of when applying one piece (or “continuous”) flow. It’s not a miracle cure, and while it can be used outside of an assembly line, there are a few practical elements which can’t be ignored.

So, today I’ll be diving into:

• What one piece flow is
• The advantages and disadvantages
• How to implement it
• Using one piece flow in any area of your business
• The problems of theory vs practical effects

Let’s get started.

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Simple as it may be, Little’s law is an incredibly powerful tool in the arsenal of almost any team. From performing back-of-the-napkin calculations to showing the performance of a system over time, this formula is one of the key building blocks to running an efficient business.

Without Little’s law, Lean and Kanban wouldn’t exist, and key elements of America’s nuclear deterrence would be left up to chance.

After all, you can’t fly B-2 stealth bombers into action if they’re all under maintenance due to bad queue management.
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One of the key strengths of top companies is the employees inside them.

Who they hire and how they hire them helps determine employee attainment, employee satisfaction, employee accountability, and employee turnover.

Small changes to recruiting processes can have a surprisingly large impact on the day to day life of a company. According to the Glassdoor Economic Research (2015) report, a 10% harder interview process is associated with a 2.6% higher employee satisfaction later on.

Loads of our clients use Process Street for managing their recruitment processes and we know all too well how important it is to get that process right.

That’s why we’re going to explore how 3 top tech giants manage their recruitment and see what gold standard techniques we can pass on to you. We’ll explore:

• The three stage process Google use to make new hires
• How Facebook hire Builders not just regular folk
• What SpaceX do to hire the best of the best

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On October 3rd 2017, the Financial Times reported that Tesla shares had slumped after the business hit a bottleneck in its production.

Tesla shares fell nearly 2 per cent to $335.91 after the Palo Alto-based company said that it produced just 260 of its Model 3 vehicles in the third quarter, well below the target of more than 1,500 that chief executive Elon Musk had predicted for the month of September alone.

What caused that failure to hit the target?

A bottleneck.

A bottleneck is when one process in a chain of processes cannot perform to the standard of those around it, creating a delay which damages the other processes.

No matter how well Tesla creates batteries or programs its self-driving software, if the factory can’t, for example, install tires fast enough then Tesla can only produce cars at the rate it installs tires.

That poor process brings all of production down to its level. Business output becomes defined by its weakest link.

But it’s not just shop floor industrial processes which fall foul of these problems. Any business or set of operations will be faced with this challenge too. In this article, we’ll look at a couple of approaches you can use to attempt to identify and overcome bottlenecks in your business.

• Flow charts help you visualize current operations
• The Five Whys technique allows you to identify root causes quickly
• Toyota’s three concepts for process implementation focus your improvement
• How Process Street can assist in beating bottlenecks

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What connects a 75% drop in infection rates, a 48% increase in home rebuilding speeds, and an extra 400 hungry families receiving the supplies they need to get by?

Have you guessed yet?

That’s right. Effective process analysis and implementation. Specifically, the Toyota Production System process analysis and implementation.

In this article, we’re going to look at some of the heartwarming success stories of process implementation carried out by the Toyota team.

The human side of organizational systems demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of learning and understanding how to create continuous improvement in your processes.

Throughout these examples we’ll see a number of key Toyota concepts employed and how they worked in practice:

• genchi genbutu – to “go and see”, to embed yourself in the system and observe,
• kaizen – to employ ideas of continual improvement, making small iterative changes,
• muda – to identify waste, and to recognize that what constitutes waste is contingent on your situation.

From disaster relief to pediatric hospitals, the benefits of strong process analysis are clear for all to see.

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From putting together flat-packed furniture to avoiding nuclear war, we’ve talked at length on why processes are important.

They’re the lifeblood of any consistent business, allowing it to repeat its successes, avoid mistakes, increase efficiency, and create effective to do lists. Without them you have no hope of even knowing what you’re doing right or wrong – you’ve more chance of putting together IKEA furniture with no instructions than of improving your situation and growing your business.

However, without standardizing processes you make, anything you document will do more harm than good.

Different layouts will make it hard to distinguish what the correct version of the process is, varying language across your teams will make working together a nightmare, while multiple naming and storage methods make it impossible to search for the process you need.

So, today I’ll show you how to standardize your processes by creating a documentation style guide which suits your needs. This guide can then be followed whenever anyone in your business needs to document a workflow.

It’s time to unify your company and cement your success.

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Processes are our deal. It’s what we do.

Unsurprisingly, it’s what our users do too. They use Process Street to manage their internal processes and keep their teams working at maximum efficiency.

In our constant attempt to understand our users’ needs, we asked the community what their biggest pain points were. We wanted to see what obstacles hampered the process management of companies and how we could help them combat that.

Our research across 83 respondents gave us a great deal of insight but one key takeaway stood out:

42% of respondents said they had no time to create processes.

Even worse, a further 54% of those (23% of the total responses) say they are currently taking no steps to remedy this situation!

This post will attempt to tackle this problem and present actionable ways you can ramp up your process production and save yourself time.

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Communicating the right things at the right times is vital in all walks of life.

Within a complex business with multiple moving parts, the value of this communication is high and the effects of poor communication are potentially catastrophic.

As Professor Allen Webster puts it:

Without communication and the team effort it permits, the successful completion of any important project can be jeopardized.

There are two elements of communication here to be addressed:

1. How effectively we are understanding key concepts and terms
2. How effectively we are utilizing and communicating those concepts and their effects to our teams

The three concepts we’re going to tackle specifically in this article are processes, policies and procedures.

What are the differences between them? How do we effectively utilize each? How do we, at Process Street, utilize these concepts within our organizational structure?

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Apple is well-known for being innovative and immensely successful, to the point where the company is worth $750 billion (and counting). However, without a healthy dose of workflow analysis they would’ve crumbled under their own business model back in the late 1980s.

“We could no longer afford the limitations that went with our product development processes… The lack of a formal new product development process led to confusion, wasted time, and often caused project teams to ‘re-create the wheel’” – Jackie Streeter (then VP of Engineering at Apple), Apple Rethinks Core Process: Improves Cycle Time

The simple truth is that any company (no matter the size or success) needs to regularly review its workflows and processes in order to keep them up to date and efficient. Tasks should be updated, improved, and automated where possible to save time and money, but without using the best workflow management software around to analyze and improve your business practices, your entire business model itself can prevent your success.

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