Question

What tools can be used to ensure processes achieve their desired results? Discuss a time you may have used a tool to aide you in process development/design and what your experience was.

Answer 1

The term Process Improvement plays a key role in the success of any organization. To effectively implement new changes in the organization as a part of process improvement plan companies can make use of Lean Six Sigma methods. Lean Six Sigma concepts addresses business tasks to optimize the business process and implement new quality standards. While implementing process improvement methods, organizations must ensure that they follow a systematic approach to making it more effective.

Tools can be used to ensure processes achieve their desired results are-

- Comparing and Baselining a Process- To get an overview of how a process is performing in comparison to other similar processes, we can make use of other four processes which are listed below:

(a) Baseline Building -It is very essential to build a clear business baseline. This is necessary because it will help an organization to focus on all business aspects, and create a good plan or methodology to overcome all the business issues that have affected business goals and objectives.

(b) Baseline Classification- It is important that organizations compare themselves with their competitors. They can select organizations which have a greater performance or companies which have similar culture.

- Flow-charting
Flow-charting tool can be used by the organizations for documenting their process. According to some experts, this is the best tool for documenting the processes. This tool helps organizations to clearly segregate their processes, activities, and events and also helps them in understanding the work efforts put in by their employees. With the help of a flow-charting tool, the organization can clearly identify the organizational needs and address them effectively.

- Value-Stream Mapping
This tool provides a complete and clear picture of the workflow process and also helps organizations in identifying the waste such as over processing, long waiting periods, excess production and defects. These issues can be addressed by the company by making use of value-stream mapping tool.

- Cause and Effect Analysis
Generally, problems can be identified by examining all the possible causes. Cause and Effect analysis tool helps organizations to perform and reach to the root cause of the problem. Cause and Effect analysis concentrates on six different areas for determining the root cause of the issue, and these six areas are environment, measurement, materials, machine, method, and personnel. Organizations can get immediate solution while using this approach, but if they opt for any other approach then there are possibilities that this might take longer time periods and also the potential cause may not be clear, in such case organizations can make use of statistical analysis of historical data which can be used for testing various theories.

- Hypothesis Testing-
Hypothesis testing includes null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis. Null hypothesis refers to equality between two process outputs while alternative hypothesis refers to non-equality.There are many formats available for performing hypothesis tests. Organizations have to select a right hypothesis test format that is best suited for their company environment. If the organizations select a wrong hypothesis test format which is not apt for their environment then it is very much possible that it might affect company's targets and objectives.

I was working with edtech company and my manager asked me to perform Baseline Classification of the product that we are selling in the market. I made a research about the competitor company such as Extramarks and examine their product and culture with our company. Through this baseline classification the plan was made to implement on the company for there betterment.