Question

Internal processes of a company contribute to the company's overall effectiveness. Identifying ways to improve internal processes helps build a highly efficient organization. Root causes need to be identified. Methods to identify root causes may require substantial analysis or be apparent based on a major problem within the organization. For example, review the assigned article, "Inside Chipotle's Contamination Crisis: Smugness and Happy Talk About Sustainability Aren't Working Anymore," from Bloomberg Businessweek. Research several other sources regarding Chipotle's food contamination crisis. Create a flowchart of the original supply chain and how Chipotle supplies each of the restaurant chains. Provide your own commentary. Create another flowchart that suggests a new way to supply the restaurant chains. Review another restaurant chain that does not currently have a major public problem but would benefit from evaluating its manufacturing process to improve competitiveness. Specifically, provide recommendations on how to improve the company's current supply chain. Create a flowchart to illustrate your recommendations. Provide a summary of how you came to your recommendations. Include any formal strategies and informal thought processes you used to reach your conclusions. Provide rationale for either using or not using Six Sigma methodology, ISO quality benchmarking, lean supply chain processes, or TQM. Submit all three flowcharts and commentary for each flowchart in a single document. Provide three to five resources to support your response. While APA format is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion. You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. Please refer to the directions in the Student Success Center.

Answer 1

Improving Business Process

About Business Processes

Processes can be formal or informal. Formal processes – also known as procedures – are documented, and have well-established steps.

For example, you might have procedures for receiving and submitting invoices, or for establishing relationships with new clients. Formal processes are particularly important when there are safety-related, legal or financial reasons for following particular steps.

Informal processes are more likely to be ones that you have created yourself, and you may not have written them down. For example, you might have your own set of steps for noting meeting actions, carrying out market research, or communicating new leads.

6 Tips for Performing a Successful Root Cause Analysis

1. Collect the right information. Your analysis will only be as good as the data you collect, so compiling comprehensive, accurate, and consistent information about your incidents is essential. RCA software can provide intuitive form design and simple entry screens to ensure you are capturing the right information at first instance.

2. Create a fear-free incident reporting environment. You can’t investigate something that was never reported. To be effective, all incidents must be reported. To that end, consider opening up incident reporting to anyone in the organization and create a fear-free reporting environment by allowing reports to be made anonymously. If you have the information, you can take action to reduce those costs.

3. Look beyond the incident report. The incident report is the best place to start identifying events to be investigated; however, it is critical to dig deeper than just what the form states. Take a step back to understand the full chain of events and relationships that led to the incident. Get the right team in the room to discuss the event and ask all those personally involved in the event, those familiar with processes and systems, and a trained RCA facilitator to lead the discussion.

4. Ask questions. The five whys technique is helpful in digging for answers. Start with the problem and work backwards to sequence all of the contributing events. Ask why the incident happened. Take that answer and ask why again, drilling down until you reach a cause that can’t be broken down any further. Explore all potential causes initially, and narrow down the list to the most likely culprits. You’ll end up with a cause-and-effect diagram that will lead you to the source of the problem. When you believe you’ve reached the root cause and not another contributing factor, check your work by asking:

a) Would the event have occurred if this cause was not present?

b) Will the problem happen again if this cause is corrected or eliminated?

If the answer is no to both questions, there is a good chance you have uncovered the underlying cause. If not, keep digging. Note that there may be multiple root causes, each of which must be addressed to prevent similar incidents in the future.

5. Focus your attention where you can have the greatest impact. Since very few companies have the time or resources to drill down into every incident or claim, it is important to focus attention where you can have the greatest impact. About 80% of your issues will be caused by 20% of your problems – known as the Pareto Principle. Develop action plans around your key issues that clearly state what corrective measures need to be taken for each root cause, when they need to be done, and who is responsible. Then after you have corrected the issues, it is critical to assess your success. The only way to know you truly found and fixed the root cause of the problem is to compare incident data over time. If the problem was fixed and you performed a successful Root Cause Analysis, you should see a significant downward trend in similar incidents.

6. Leverage technology. Many organizations find it difficult to identify incident/near miss trends because workflows, business processes, and technology are too cumbersome for employees to document events in a timely and meaningful way. Software can help you simplify and streamline the root cause analysis process by seamlessly integrating claim, incident and cause data into one platform. Software tools designed to support successful Root Cause Analysis follow a structured approach to capture and analyze data, identify and implement corrective actions, and track the progress of new initiatives. You can assign and perform the RCA model that makes the most sense for the given incident and get accurate, real-time results to quickly identify the root-cause and implement corrective actions to improve safety.

RCA works to solve the issue at the root itself in an efficient, cost-effective way, which can have far-reaching benefits for the organization. It can uncover previously hidden relationships between causes and symptoms and provide enduring solutions that will result in increased safety and lower costs. And by successfully getting to the root cause of one problem, you may have solved several others along the way – which can have a significant impact on your Total Cost of Risk (TCOR).

The is research revealed the following major results:

• The global recession served to heighten awareness of the importance of excellent process execution for company-wide performance,

• Going forward, most finance executives believe their companies’ performance can benefit either moderately or substantially from further process improvements across a wide range of functional areas.

• Most of the companies represented in the survey make either moderate or substantial use of process benchmarks to support their process improvement efforts.

• According to many of the finance executives in the survey, developing appropriate metrics to help guide colleagues’ process improvement efforts is one of the most important contributions finance can make.

Paths to process improvement

The is reliance on internal personnel may help explain the importance of benchmarking in process improvement. Most of the companies represented in the survey make at least moderate, if not substantial, use of both internal process benchmarks (53% moderate use, 26% substantial use) and external process benchmarks (52% moderate use, 15% substantial use). The larger companies (with more than US$5 billion in revenues) are more likely than smaller companies to use external process benchmarks along with internal ones; almost all of those who say they make little use of external process benchmarks are from companies smaller than US$5 billion in revenues.

Tying action to results. The relatively high use of benchmarks reflects a broader awareness of the need to be able to measure progress and results for process improvement initiatives. According to many of the respondents, finance’s expertise in tying metrics to performance is among the most important contributions finance can make to enterprise-wide process improvement.

Working across organizational boundaries. But the finance executives in the survey also believe that their value does not stop with developing the appropriate metrics. They rank just as highly their ability to work collaboratively and their enterprise-wide knowledge of the business.

Managing process complexity. Finally, managing the complexity and diversity of processes across a large enterprise may be one area in which finance executives believe further gains can be made.

Conclusion

From a traditional, cost-focused point of view, process improvements primarily have been seen in terms of increasing efficiency—that is, making business processes faster, cheaper, less error-prone, and less of a drain on valuable or scarce resources. Now, however, finance executives in our survey reveal an expanded view of the benefits and importance of improving their companies’ processes. As companies emerge from the global recession and begin to lay the groundwork for growth again, processes more often are examined with an eye to increasing their effectiveness— producing better business outcomes. Efficiency improvements often are pursued just by focusing on the process itself, in isolation from the other business processes that are tied into it at either end. Optimizing process effectiveness, in contrast, requires taking a broader perspective across the entire enterprise to assess the linkages between processes and to target improvements in the ultimate business results.