PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT/IFSM300/WK3 Order Description   RESPOND TO THE THREE CLASSMATES MICHAEL, AMANDA AND CHRISTOPHER SEPARATELY IN 2OO WORDS EACH WITH 2 REFERENCES EACH. DO NOT USE UK, LONDON, OR BRITISH REFERENCES. THE CLASSMATES ANSWERED THE FOLLOWING ORIGINAL DISCUSSION QUESTION AND YOU ARE TO RESPOND TO THEIR ANSWER. DISCUSSION QUESTION: Drawing from your own experience, select a process (a set of specified steps to accomplish a task) used at your place of work or in your interaction with a business that you would like to see improved and briefly describe the process. 1) Explain why you picked that process. 2) Explain how you would go about improving it. 3) Who should be involved with you? 4) What are some of the questions you should ask about the current process? 5) How will you know if the process was actually improved? REFERENCES Bourgeois, D. (2014). Information Systems for Business and Beyond. Washington, D.C.: Saylor Foundation. https://www.zdnet.com/article/cio-view-ten-principles-for-effective-collaboration/ https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658094.aspx   MICHAEL’S POST: Drawing from my dad's experiences while working for the Ford Motor Company, I've went with a process called Lean. What is lean you ask? Well I'm glad you asked. Lean is a management philosophy that originated in the automotive manufacturing industry. Its practical solutions are logically translated to non-production processes and are now being successfully applied to many other areas including information technology, help desk and customer services, administrative operations, and more. Lean considers the flow of the beginning-to-end actions and all the interactions between them as a process value chain. Steps are identified from the customer’s point of view meaning that the value of each action in the stream is determined by whether it adds value from the customer perspective or does not add value from the customer perspective. Steps that are required but irrelevant from the customer perspective represent a final classification—non-value adding but required. Lean applies particular tools and measures to look for common types of process flow waste and then visually illustrates where that waste decreases value and adds unnecessary business cost. Eight areas of waste are sought after as opportunities for process improvement, which as we all know is key for competitive edge. They are commonly known as correction, extra processing, inventory, excess motion, overproduction, transportation, waiting, and underutilized resources. These wastes have been redefined and adapted to the different industries as they are applied. Once waste is identified, criteria related to the overall health and maturity of the process are considered in selecting solutions to improve the process and set a new baseline for evaluating its future effectiveness. Lean applies practical solutions to practical problems that can exist in any workflow. Practical solutions are sometimes obvious fixes that can be quickly implemented. Though, Lean is not about sudden, major overhauls of a process. Once reasonable quick fixes are made, Lean prefers a planned, managed approach of incremental process changes over time to large one-time changes. This means a better chance for long-term success. There is misconceptions that Lean means reducing waste by eliminating employees. To the contrary, an important reason for reducing process waste is to free up staff to develop and use their skills in more meaningful ways that actually increase their value. In fact, companies who use process improvement to eliminate headcount historically fail at becoming mature, successful, process-based organizations. Why? Because employees know best where process waste exists and typically come up with the best ideas for improving processes. Who would have though! A wise organization retains these employees so they can be constantly recognizing and recommending improvement opportunities both in their individual jobs and larger company processes. Employees are the best resource for knowing how to increase value to customers. References: Womack, James P.; Daniel T. Jones (2003). Lean Thinking. Free Press. p. 352. Krafcik, John F. (1988). "Triumph of the lean production system". Sloan Management Review. 30 (1): 41–52. AMANDA’S RESPONSE: Appointment Reminder System 1) Explain why you picked that process. The current process of reminding members within our unit of appointments is very daunting, time consuming, and extra work for system administrators. For example, soldering class. To schedule a person that needs this training we have to do the following: 1. Call/Email training facility to request slot 2. Member is scheduled 3. System administrator (me), inputs appointment into personnel management system (Microsoft Access Database). Great concept very convoluted. 4. Populate appointment slip, email member, generate automated text message to remind them, email supervisor. 5. Update in office training tracker 6. Supervisor reminds employee of appointment day of. 7. Member attends training, and hopefully does not forget. 2) Explain how you would go about improving it. I think that the process could be simplified. By populating so many products to remind members of an appointment is daunting for schedulers. By simply just not populating an appointment slip, or a text message could free up at least 10 minutes. Though 10 minutes seems small, populating appointment reminders for approximately 600 people within a training cycle could save 100 man hours, and that is just for one appointment category. 3) Who should be involved with you? One of the main focus points would be the person that is scheduled for the training. It should be assumed that an adult should be aware of their training and practice self-accountability to ensure attendance. Secondly, supervisor. Supervisors holding employees accountable for missing appointments or training. Thirdly, system administrators. Reviewing the process and receiving feedback as the most effective way to remind people of their appointments/training. 4) What are some of the questions you should ask about the current process? Why are people still missing appointments/training with all the reminders? Why are supervisors not following up with employees to remind them? What could employees do to be more involved in the reminder system? 5) How will you know if the process was actually improved? Training deviations, no shows to appointments reduced. Man hours lost to multiple reminders gained back and allocated to other important tasks.   CHRISTOPHER POST: Working at the library, there are a number of processes involved, and since we recently transitioned to a new integrated library system, a lot of the processes were reviewed, or changed. This revision of processes is ongoing as we learn how things are actually working, but this has demonstrated some shortcomings and poor process management within the regional consortium. I’m going to focus on the process of fulfilling a hold, and I chose that particular process because it is one of the more involved processes and important to good customer service. Fulfilling a hold for a patron can be quite lengthy, depending on the material and the availability of the material, with many opportunities for mistakes to occur. To begin with, I would gather some of the critical people involved and map out the process from beginning to end (Bendell, 2005). For example, the courier between the libraries fills a pretty big part within the process, being responsible for routing the material. I would also want a representative from the member libraries, ideally someone directly involved with the process since I am not familiar with how all the members operate, and this degree of integration between libraries is relatively recent. After mapping out the process with the input of responsible staff members, I would aim to streamline or simplify the process by combining steps or consolidating responsibilities. For example, under the current system, the staff member who retrieves a title from the shelf is not necessarily the one checking the item in for the reserve or routing it to the appropriate branch, which is increasing the room for error, consolidating this responsibility into one staff member may reduce errors and ideally would speed up the process. It is also important to identify which parts of the current process work well, so in the meeting with involved staff, ideally we could identify which parts of the process should be kept and which need to be changed. After a new process for the fulfillment of requests was established, it would be important to monitor if the time between a request being placed and when it was fulfilled had been reduced in order to establish if the new process was an improvement over the previous process. Bendell, T. (2005). Structuring business process improvement methodologies. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 16(8/9), 969-978. doi:10.1080/14783360500163110. Huan, V. (2011). Adding Action to the Information Audit. Proceedings Of The European Conference On Information Management & Evaluation, 546-555.