Quality Management & Training

Business Process Analysis (BPA)

Business Process Analysis training helps evaluate the key business processes to make them efficient and effective as possible and remove all sources of waste.

Organisations are full of processes, not only manufacturing processes but processes for purchasing, warehousing, handling orders, etc. Very often these processes have evolved as the organisation has grown, sometimes keeping pace, sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer size of the organisational growth.

To solve growth problems quick fix solutions may be used e.g. increasing the labour resource rather than improving or overhauling the process. Sometimes this can just make the situation worse. (If it takes one man one day to dig a hole – then one hundred men can dig the hole in one hundredth of the time!!!).  In other words increasing the labour resource again will not necessarily result in quicker throughput. Some jobs just cannot be done by more than one person.

Not only can processes be very complex and involved but they can also be very inefficient; responsibility ownership can be unclear. This is because it can be very difficult to understand, control and manage all the tasks involved in a process from start to finish.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

  • Customer focus – Customer focus in all that we do. 
    The aim of customer focus being to continually understand the customer’s needs and expectations. Quality is judged by the customer and the judgements the customer makes are: Value, Satisfaction and Preference. It is therefore essential that delegates understand that the customer has:
  • Non-Value Added Activities 
    The objective with Non-Value Added Activities is to identify and eliminate those activities that do not contribute towards the customer requirements. With many processes there can be activities which may be considered worthwhile but may not add any value to the finished product or service.  This is particularly when considering Value Stream Mapping which is a Lean technique used to analyse the flow of materials and information currently required to bring a product or service to a customer.

An organisation supports it customers through a small number of key processes.
Although there are many processes running in and through organisations there are only a few (possibly six) which are key in delivering the organisation’s product or service.

  • Bidding to Winning – Enquiry/Quotation to Customer Order
  • Product or Service delivery – Providing the product or service
  • Product or Service Development – Product or Service Improvement
  • Supplier Development – Improving the Performance of Suppliers
  • Customer Support – Technical or service support
  • Invoice to Cash

These processes often provide 80% of a businesses’ turnover but only constitute 20% of their costs. The processes running through an organisation can be complex, cross functional and sometimes wasteful. This waste can manifest itself in terms of:

  • Cost to run the process (number of transactions per employee).
  • The length of time to get from one end of the process to the other (lead time)
  • The quality of the service provided e.g. errors, response or delivery times.

As a result of the course the delegate should be able to:

  • Apply the recognised industry standard analysis technique of business modeling.
  • Identify opportunities and problem areas within an existing business environment.
  • Model and assess the impact of any proposed changes to a business system.
  • Design and document robust and reliable business systems, that meet the needs of your users.
  • Carry out the analysis and design to precisely the level of detail required.
  • Complete a Value Stream Mapping exercise
  • Provide the opportunity to make real major financial saving through QM&T’s pre and post course supported assignment scheme.
  • Be QM&T validated and certificated Business Process Analysis practitioner.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Quality Managers, Quality Engineers, Business Process Owners, Process Improvement Managers, System implementers , Management representatives , System coordinators , Change managers, Improvement teams.

COURSE STRUCTURE

Business analysis provides the basis for the analysis, comprehension and design of new business processes, underpinning business process re-engineering. The delegate will understand how to create business models that depict the current, or planned, business system and how to optimize the use of business processes within any business environment.

Modelling Simple Processes (Process Selection & Project Definition)

  • Diagram Notation – This section explains the basic skills and knowledge needed to draw these diagrams, their structures and notation standards.
  • Topics covered include: entities, data flows, processes, data stores and resource flows.
  • Exercise – Drawing a simple business process diagram for a common business scenario.
  • Specific Diagrams – Introduces and then tests basic knowledge and skills in producing simple specific diagrams as a way of documenting system scope and boundaries.
  • Exercise – Shows the delegate how to draw a context diagram for a simple business system.
  • Process Selection – How to select the most suitable process for evaluation.

Conducing the Analysis (Understanding the Process)

  • Gathering the information – Explanation of how and what information regarding the process needs to be established. The process objectives. The standards expected from the process need to be agreed, e.g. the quality standards of the quotations – levels of detail, quantity of information etc. What are the inputs, outputs, controls and resources required to run the process? What are the projected new targets that should be achieved following the re-engineering of the process? e.g. What is the ideal number of people to run the process?
  • Evaluation – How to evaluate this information now needs to be established, discussed and agreed, with a view to establishing a better solution – brain storming, tree diagrams and other problem solving techniques.
  • Process Evaluation – An explanation of how to analyse and document the main functional areas of the system under investigation, with reference to previously drawn context diagrams.
  • Resource Flow – Demonstrates how to identify, read and draw resource flow diagrams; this technique is a particularly useful start point where the business is concerned with the movement of physical goods or ‘resources’.
  • Organisation Structure – Another view of a system, process or organization is from its functional perspective; this section teaches delegates to conduct this type of analysis.
  • Document Flow – An organisation which makes extensive use of either paper-based or computerised documentation can be examined from a document flow perspective; this section teaches delegates to construct document flow diagrams.
  • Exercise – This exercise involves the drawing of a basic business process diagram using a context diagram and a document flow diagram; a detailed case study supports the exercise.

Refining the Process (Implementing the Improved Process)

Evaluation of how to implement the new agreed solution, with all the associated Project Plan, Procedure Writing and training to ensure successful start of the re-engineered solution.
Finally, and most importantly, recognition via presentation to management to show changes, successes and failures with the new process.

  • Exercise – Delegates are guided through the process of drawing a intermediate level business process diagram by the top down expansion of the basic level diagram; this exercise is also supported by a detailed case study.
  • Elementary Processes – An elementary process is one which requires no further analysis and the delegates understand how to identify and annotate elementary processes.
  • Checking Diagrams – Having created business process diagrams the final and essential step is to check that they are meaningful, intelligible and complete; this section explains how to examine and verify the entire business model.

Course Options:

1.  Pre-course visit to develop and adapt the course and associated material to exactly suit the client’s needs. Can include branding the material with company style and logo.

2.  Pre and post course delegate assignment with QM&T support. The delegate’s assignment / project would be fully assisted and supported online and assessed by one of our qualified and experienced staff.  This work based assignment approach has regularly provided significant financial savings, reinforce lessens learnt and provided a practical demonstration of delegate competence.  This (on successful assignment completion) provides the delegates with a QM&T Practitioner certificate.  This approach is often useful where delegates may not (due to other pressures) be able to immediately apply the newly acquired knowledge.

3.  The book Quality Management – Tools and Techniques, by Geoff Vorley and Fred Tickle

This book would be invaluable for the delegates to complete their pre and post course assignments and provides much greater information than could be delivered in a one day course.   The book also places the subject in context and is invaluable in supporting concepts such as Lean and other improvement approaches.

4. Delegate assignment presentation provides the delegate with the opportunity to demonstrate their achievements to a selected group such as; CEO and Directors, key Managers and Supervisors, Editor of the company magazine, etc.  This gives the delegate the opportunity to credit and recognise their performance and motive others to emulate.

COURSE DATES AND COST

See Training Courses for price list and order form