Thoughts on Process Improvement

I belabored the point on simplicity of process thinking in my last post. Was planning to do more of it but better sense prevailed. Please read through the Wikipedia post on time and motion studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study). That too illustrates what I penned about (or was it pinned about…pun intended) in my last post.

Moving on, the next question is how much do we break-down a process? A seeming simple question and there could be seemingly simple answers. A good rule of thumb I follow is as follows:
1. If the process is broke down to a level (call it step) where you cannot isolate / measure the impact of a particular input on the step, you have gone too deep.
2. If the process is at a level where the measure / impact does not allow for generating a meaningful conclusion, you are looking at it far too high a level.

Regardless of the confusing rules of thumb up there, the simple statement of fact is it should be at a level where:
1. It can be defined
2. It can be measured
3. It should lend itself to some improvement or even better removal from the process
4. It should have a clear link to the next step in the process

Believe it or not, while I did not really plan it that way, when I re-read the above statements, I saw D M I of DMAIC. Call it coincidence if you will. (I won’t push myself to add the A or C right here)

For someone who does not know DMAIC, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC#DMAIC will provide all the dope you need. It is simply Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve & Control.

The above link talks about six sigma and also DMAIC. There are some good words and some criticism. I would not spend too much time on the criticism and stuff. When I look at these frameworks, all I see is just that—a framework.

For me, DMAIC is five cool English verbs that can help provide structure to a problem.

More in the next post…

This post examines the thought that business process improvement is simple and commonsensical.Wikipedia has the following definition for Business Process.

“A business process or business method is a collection of interrelated tasks, which accomplish a particular goal.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process)

There was one interesting example they gave here of how Adam Smith defined the pin-making process in 1776.
”One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations: to put it on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is another … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometime perform two or three of them.”

There is another reference to this in an article from a site called Living Gloucester. “Pin making by hand was an industry that required the skills of a number of different craftsmen. Adam Smith, the pioneering economist, considered pin making a classic example of the “division of labour”. Just how many different craftsmen were involved in the chain of production is controversial. Some manufacturers seem to have managed with six workers, whilst others required up to twenty-five. There may have been a tendency to sub-divide the processes as the eighteenth century went on.”

Lets come back to the simplicity of the process. For a manufacturer who was using 25 people for the job, this must have been a fairly complex process and possibly, a little less so for the person using six people. That is when you look at the process as a whole. But the focus of my claim of the simplicity of a process is the process description by Adam Smith. In his statement, you see a “break-down” of the process into tasks and there lies the beginning of process improvement.Right in 1824, 60 years after Adam Smith’s famous example, an American called Lemuel Wright patented his machine for making solid head pins. And you and I know more about pin making today than we did yesterday.