Процессный подход к деятельности организации

Тема 2. LEAN. Ключевые принципы

Организация, как система

· Особенности системного подхода к деятельности организации подробно рассмотрены в первой части дисциплины («Самообучающиеся организации», «Теория ограничений»).

Процессный подход к операционной деятельности

3. Понятие «клиент»

Теория вариаций и операциональные определения

ПРОЦЕССНЫЙ ПОДХОД к ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ

Функциональный подход

Процесс – это преобразование входа в выход через сеть операций и буферов путем использования ресурсов, ИТ и менеджмента

Включает 5 элементов:

Inputs and Outputs. To view an organization as a process, we must first identify its inputs and outputs. Inputs refer to any tangible or intangible items that "flow" into the process from the environment; they include raw materials, component parts, energy, data, and customers in need of service. Engines, tires, and chassis are examples of inputs from the environment into an auto assembly plant. Outputs are any tangible or intangible items that flow from the process back into the environmen t, such as finished products, pollu­tion, processed information, or satisfied customers. For example, cars leave as output from an assembly plant to the dealerships. So, an organization's inputs and outputs shape its interaction with its environment.

As inputs flow through the process they are transformed and exit as outputs. For example, raw materials flow through a manufacturing process and exit as finished goods. Similarly, data flows through an accounting process and exits as financial state­ments, and invoiced dollars (accounts receivable) flow through a billing and collection process and exit as collected dollars (cash).

Flow Units. The second step in establishing a process view is obtaining a clear understanding of the flow units — the item —being analyzed. Depending on the process, the flow unit may be a unit of input, such as a customer order, or a unit of output, such as a finished product. The flow unit can also be the financial value of the input or out­put. For example, the flow at an Amazon warehouse can be analyzed in terms of books, customer orders, or dollars. Determining what the flow units are is important in process analysis and performance evaluation. Table 1.1 lists some generic business processes and identifies the flow units that move through the input-output transformation.

Network of Activities and Buffers. The third step in adopting the process view is describing the process as a network of activities and buffers.

An activity is the simplest form of transformation; it is the building block of a process. An activity is actually a miniprocess in itself, but for our purposes of process evaluation and improvement, we are not concerned with the details of any specific activity, so a black box view of the activities will suffice. For example, when studying an interorganizational process such as a supply chain that includes suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, it is enough to view each organization as one activity or black box rather than looking at all the activities that take place within each organization.

Examples of Generic Business Processes

Process	Flow Unit	Input-Output Transformation
Order fulfillment	Orders	From the receipt of an order to the delivery of the product
Production	Products	From the receipt of raw materials to the completion of the finished product
Outbound logistics	Products	From the end of production to the delivery of the product to the customer
Shipping	Products/ Orders	From the shipment of the product/order to the delivery to the customer
Supply cycle	Supplies	From issuing of a purchase order to the receipt of the supplies
Customer service	Customers	From the arrival of a customer to their departure
New product development	Projects	From the recognition of a need to the launching of a product
Cash cycle	Cash	From the expenditure of funds (costs) to the collection of revenues

When studying each organization more fully, however, we must study its particular transformation process by looking closely at its specific activities. At this level, we would look at activ­ities such as spot welding sheet metal to an auto chassis, checking in passengers at air­port terminals, entering cost data in accounting information systems, and receiving electronic funds transfers at collection agencies.

A buffer stores flow units that have finished with one activity but are waiting for the next activity to start. For example, a patient who has registered at an emergency room waits in a waiting room to see the doctor. Similarly, cars that have been painted wait in a stor­age area before entering the assembly line. For physical goods, a buffer often corre­sponds to a physical location where the goods are stored. A process, however, may also have a buffer that does not correspond to any physical location, as in case of customer orders waiting to be processed. You can think of storage in a buffer as a special activity that transforms the time dimension of a flow unit by delaying it. In business processes, storage is called inventory which is the total number of flow units present within process boundaries. The amount of inventory in the system is an important performance meas­ure that we discuss in detail in Chapter 3.

Process activities are linked so that the output of one becomes an input into another, often through an intermediate buffer —hence the term a network of activities and buffers. This network describes the specific precedence relationships among activities— the sequen­tial relationships that determine which activity must be finished before another can begin. As we ill see later, the precedence relationships in a network structure strongly influence the rime performance of the process. In multiproduct organizations, producing each prod­uct requires activities with a specific set of precedence relationships. Each network of activities, then, can have multiple "routes," each of which indicates precedence relationships for a specific product.

Resources. The fourth element of the process view consists of organizational resources. From an operations perspective, resources are tangible assets that are usually divided into two categories:

· Capital — fixed assets such as land, buildings, facilities, equipment, machines, and infor­mation systems

· Labor — people such as engineers, operators, customer-service representatives, and sales staff

Resources facilitate the transformation of inputs into outputs during the process. Some activities require multiple resources (a welding activity, for instance, requires a worker and a welding gun), and some resources can perform multiple activities (some workers can not only weld but also drill). The allocation of resources to activities is an important decision in managing any process.

Information Structure. The fifth and final element of the process view of an organi­zation is its information structure, which shows what information is needed and is available to whom in order to perform activities or make managerial decisions.

Thus, we can now define a business process as a network of activities separated by buffers and performed by resources that transform inputs into outputs. Process design specifies the structure of a business process in terms of inputs, outputs, the network of activities and buffers, and the resources used. Process flow management, therefore, is a set of managerial policies that specify how a process should be operated over time and which resources should be allocated to which activities. This process view of organizations will be our basis for evalu­ating and improving organizational performance. We will see how process design and process flow management significantly affect the performance of every organization.

The process view is applicable to a variety of organizations. It can represent a manufacturing process that transforms raw materials into finished products as well as services performed by accounts receivable departments, product design teams, com­puter rental companies, and hospitals. The process view is also a convenient tool for representing cross-functional processes within an organization, including production, finance, and marketing-related functions and supplier relationships. By incorporating buffers, we also account for handoffs or interfaces between different people or activities— typically the areas where most improvements can be made. In addition, the process view can be adopted at a very broad level, such as the supply chain, or at a very micro level, such as a workstation in a plant. The process view is "customer-aware"—it always includes the customer—the person who receives the outputs.

Value stream mapping or value chain mapping is a tool used to map the network of activities and buffers in a process identifying the activities that add value and those like waiting that are wasteful. The goal of value stream mapping is to enable process designers and managers to focus on process improvement by adding value to the final product. Processes should ideally be designed and managed to add value at every step of the process. This book is aimed at identifying design and management strategies that improve the value adding potential of a process.

The process view highlights the fact that every organization is a collection of inter­connected processes. For example, filling a customer order at Amazon involves the order-taking process, the picking and packing process at the warehouse, and the ship­ping process. The performance of the picking and packing process relies on accurate receiving and replenishment of material at the warehouse. If an item has been mis­placed during receiving, the picker may not be able to find it when looking to fill an order. The basic point to understand is that the success of any organization requires alignment of effort across all its processes.

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