Process Improvement

Organizations should continually improve their business processes in order to improve performance and to satisfy changing needs and expectations of their stakeholders
There are two fundamental ways to improve business processes:

• Progressive improvement or work improvement projects resulting in moderate improvements.
• Process re-design & innovation projects resulting in strategic breakthrough.

Progressive improvement is a good technique to reduce material, manpower, and space requirements. Up to 20% improvement is quite possible. TQC's eight-step process has been repeatedly proved over the years to be a very effective methodology in enhancing improvements.
Process re-designs or process innovation would be the solution in such cases.
Process re-design should achieve significant performance improvement - in the 20% to 50% range. It requires a cross-functional team (or teams) led by a trained facilitator and may involve assistance from external specialists. The team needs to fully understand the current processes, the given inputs and the desired outputs. The involvement with process workers is a must for effective implementation.
Process innovation should lead to drastic improvement of 50% or above. Besides innovations and enhanced creativity, new technology or cultural changes are usually resulted. Such demanding projects require external specialist assistance and a high level of monitoring.