In a competitive business landscape, businesses face the challenge of finding ways to stay ahead and consistently improve productivity. The age-old adage from Peter Drucker is “only what gets measured, gets managed,” and process excellence falls within the same school of thinking.
Process excellence focuses on how a business manages and continuously reviews its processes to boost efficiency and effectiveness, ensure compliance with regulations, and deliver customer value. Although process excellence is often mistaken for operational excellence, it's just one part of it. In turn, business excellence is the result of process and operational excellence working together.
In this article, we’ll explore process excellence in detail, including what it is, its benefits, and some key process excellence methodologies.
Jump to:
What is process excellence?
Getting started with process excellence
Benefits of process excellence
Process excellence methodologies
The best process excellence tools
How to implement process excellence
Frequently asked questions
Process excellence, also known as PEX, is a strategy for continually improving business processes to maximize efficiency, effectiveness, and quality. The objective is for a business to achieve smooth, consistent workflows that deliver a competitive advantage and drive growth—all while ensuring regulatory compliance.
Process excellence involves assessing, modifying, and testing a process until it meets a defined goal and quality standard. It encompasses process improvement, design, and management techniques that optimize performance and deliver better results.
Although there isn't a strict definition for process excellence, some of the factors that determine whether a process is ‘excellent’ are:
- Efficiency
- Accuracy
- Consistency
- Visibility
- Measurability
- Flexibility
- Security
- Compliance
- Alignment with business strategy
- Boost to customer satisfaction
- Meets business targets or goals
To begin your journey toward process excellence, you first need a deep understanding of your existing processes. This foundational knowledge empowers you to pinpoint areas for improvement and make informed decisions for optimization. Here are the five pillars that unlock those insights:
1. Process discovery
To start the discovery process, you need to identify a process to focus on. Once you’ve done this, you can deep dive into the “as-is” workflow and evaluate its performance. Discovery typically involves using advanced process mining software to map the process by:
- Extracting system data: Gathering event log data from a range of systems, including enterprise and departmental software systems.
- Recording user interactions: Collecting session logs from user interactions with your systems to capture task variations and information handoffs.
2. Process analysis
Once you have visibility of the end-to-end process, you can assess whether it’s meeting its objectives. Some of the questions you may want to answer are:
- What's the current process behavior?
- What is the key performance metric for this process?
- Are there any critical problems in this process?
- Where are the opportunities for improvement? Which high-value improvement opportunities can I target?
- What does an optimized version of this process look like?
3. Process monitoring
Process visibility offers the advantage of monitoring its execution over time. Monitoring key process metrics will give you real-time performance insights and prevent process deviations. The most advanced process intelligence software will allow you to create multiple views of each process and set customized alerts to notify you of deviations.
4. Process prediction
Using advanced technologies like machine learning, you can accurately predict process outcomes based on the insights you gain from monitoring. Look at process flow deviations and prescribe solutions that will help you achieve process excellence in this area of your business. You’ll use your predictions to test a new version of the process.
5. Process simulation
The final stage involves taking your learnings from scrutinizing the process and applying them to create an optimized version of the process. Test potential process changes and evaluate their impact on your business, before implementation. Keep revising the process until it meets your quality standard to reduce the risk of lengthy, and costly, trial-and-error cycles.
Process excellence delivers tangible results for businesses who aim to identify the best version of their business workflows. Three key benefits include:
Increased business efficiency
Process excellence helps you to achieve increased efficiency by encouraging you to identify process weaknesses and design better solutions. For example, a hospital whose patient registration process involves multiple paper forms can implement a digital registration system to eliminate manual paperwork, streamline data collection, and reduce patient wait times. Process excellence is intended to be an ongoing strategy, where an organization consistently looks for ways to streamline its processes. This approach leads to consistent improvements in speed, cost-effectiveness, and overall quality of your operations.
More agile workforce
Process excellence is about more than isolated process improvement. Instilling the concept of continuous process review within your teams changes the way your company behaves and approaches work. A manufacturing company that empowers employees to suggest improvements, for instance, can create a more proactive and quality-conscious culture, reducing errors and delays. This ultimately creates an agile workforce, built on a culture of continuous learning and proactive improvement. These principles often also contribute to improving employee satisfaction.
Higher customer satisfaction
Employee engagement and satisfaction are important to a business, but your customers should always be at the forefront of process-related goals. Process excellence enables you to gain an in-depth understanding of your customers’ pain points, needs, and preferences within a process, or as a result of a process. To illustrate, let’s say a telecom company notices a spike in customer service calls due to hard-to-read billing statements. By simplifying the bills, the company can directly address the issue, leading to happier, more loyal customers.
There is no prescribed science to achieve process excellence; a number of tools exist to support organizations in optimizing their processes. But here are seven recognized methodologies you can employ to improve the quality and efficiency of your business output:
Six Sigma
One of the most popular process excellence methodologies, Six Sigma is a data-driven approach that uses statistical analysis to reduce process defects and variability. Six Sigma is a structured approach to finding the root cause of issues within a process and eliminating them. It follows two project management frameworks:
- DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control – used for existing processes
- DMADV – Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify – used for new processes
Lean
Lean is another well-known process excellence method. It aims to reduce waste in business processes by eliminating activities that don’t add value, in order to maximize customer value. Under the Lean production methodology, business should focus on eliminating the “seven wastes”:
- Defects
- Overproduction
- Inventory
- Waiting
- Transportation
- Over-processing
- Motion
Total Quality Management (TQM)
TQM is a management approach focused on achieving long-term success through the highest level of customer satisfaction. As well as emphasizing a customer-centric approach, it also promotes employee involvement, continuous improvement, and using techniques to make processes efficient. As part of this methodology, all the members of an organization contribute to improving products, services, processes, and the overall culture they work in.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
The BPR methodology involves radically redesigning business processes to achieve considerable performance improvements. Some of the key performance metrics include reduced costs, faster processes, and enhanced quality. BPR challenges an organization to thoroughly analyze its as-is processes, often by leveraging technology, to develop new processes that will deliver significant results.
5S
5S is a workplace organization methodology that first originated in Japan. Its name comes from its focus on five steps to eliminate waste within a process and continuously improve productivity: sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. By using this approach to process excellence, the 5S aims to help organizations create a more organized work environment.
Kaizen
Kaizen is a Japanese term that means “continuous improvement.” This methodology involves making small, incremental changes to optimize processes over time. Similarly to TQM, it emphasizes employee involvement, teamwork, and fostering an organizational culture of continuous learning.
Balanced Scorecard (BSC)
BSC is a strategic management tool that translates an organization's mission and strategy into a set of key performance metrics. The four metrics are based on the main aspects of a business:
- Financial
- Customer
- Internal processes
- Learning and growth measure
They’re designed to provide a comprehensive view of an organization's performance in a single report to help improve efficiencies.
When it comes to optimizing your business processes, the right tools can make the difference between stagnation and transformation. These essential solutions empower you to not only analyze and improve your workflows but also automate them, leading to streamlined operations, lower costs, and happier customers.
Process intelligence
Process intelligence tools provide a deep understanding of how your business actually operates in real time. By analyzing your existing systems, these process excellence tools reveal bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement that might otherwise go unnoticed. Comprehensive process intelligence tool provide all five process excellence capabilities mentioned above.
Business process automation (BPA)
BPA involves using technology to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks in your workflows. Invoice processing, customer onboarding, supply chain logistics—these and many other routine processes can make use of BPA to reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and free up your employees to focus on more strategic work.
Business process management (BPM)
A holistic approach for improving business processes, BPA involves the entire process lifecycle, from design to execution to optimization. BPM software provides a centralized platform to continuously improve and manage the performance of your processes.
As mentioned, there are a few methodologies you can use to achieve process excellence. If you’re unsure where to start, here are a few tips to help you optimize any workflow within your organization:
- Establish process ownership. Before you start interrogating a process, it’s useful to establish ownership. This will typically involve designating a process manager who will be accountable for giving continuous attention to the process as it’s optimized.
- Define performance metrics. Another element of accountability involves defining clear KPIs and metrics early on is also crucial, as it gives clear, structured purpose to process excellence initiatives.
- Start monitoring your processes. Regular monitoring and reporting performance against these metrics will keep the process on track and highlight areas for improvement.
- Action user and employee feedback: While employing process excellence methodologies, such as Lean and Six Sigma, make sure you capture and action feedback from both employees and customers to ensure process improvements positively impact all key stakeholders' experiences. You can use process mining and task mining to gather further insight into how users are interacting with your processes.
- Use automation where you can. Finally, consider how automation using technology like RPA or intelligent document processing can play a role in reducing errors and increasing process speed.
Start your journey to process excellence with ABBYY Timeline
ABBYY Timeline is a cloud-based, comprehensive process intelligence platform built with the latest artificial intelligence to support your process improvement efforts. Using advanced process mining and analytics, our software enables you to build an interactive digital twin of any business process so you can uncover inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and deviations. With this insight you’ll have actionable, data-driven information to target specific business areas for improvement.
A vital ingredient for achieving process excellence is continuous monitoring, a capability that Timeline is built to facilitate. Our low-code platform makes it easy for you to monitor process execution in real-time and set alerts to be notified of deviations as and when they happen. Request a demo to explore how ABBYY Timeline can support your organization in achieving process excellence.
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