Thoughts on Process Improvement

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.