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What is process improvement?
Process improvement is the systematic effort to understand every aspect of a process in order to reduce rework, variation, and needless complexity in order to exceed customer expectations.
When embarking on organizational improvement, the first step is to be sure that you are doing the right things right. This means that you have some knowledge of your customers (i.e., what they need, want, and expect). The next step is to know how work gets done in the organization, which includes the core process , and knowledge of your suppliers and customers. This knowledge prepares you to begin process improvements.
Unless you know what a process looks like, you will not know where the waste and/or rework occur. Improvement can sometimes begin with performance measures or indicators that tell you performance is not up to par. This can be customer or employee feedback (qualitative data), or financial reports, defect rates, etc. (quantitative data).
Possible roadmap for improvement:
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The other pages for Module 2 in the Quality Library break down this flowchart into its components: the tools needed for improvement.
Process Ingredients
- A process is a series of actions which repeatedly come together to transform inputs into outputs.
- Inputs come from a supplier of the process, and outputs go to a customer of the process.
- The
outcome (benefit) is the degree to which outputs meet the needs and expectations of the customer.
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Examples of Process Boundaries
Because improvements usually cannot be made on large processes all at one time, a boundary designates what part of the process you will work on.
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A System of Processes
Individual processes are often nested in groups of processes, or systems.
Each individual process is the customer of the outputs from the previous process and the supplier of inputs to the next process.
