How process improvement can increase business agility

Slow, inefficient business processes are more than a nuisance — they can be a drain on resources and blunt your competitive edge. Escalating your business agility requires taking a close look at how you do things and implementing proven best practices for process improvement.

 

Process improvement involves identifying, evaluating, and improving business processes using a specific methodology to meet a new standard of quality. Organizations can streamline processes in a way that that optimizes the use of data, technology, people, and procedures to improve agility and resilience.

 

 

Process Improvements

Logic20/20’s business strategy and operations consultants apply a standardized process improvement methodology to update and fine-tune your business processes. Our goal is to eliminate redundancies and define a way to measure the success of your process improvement initiatives. By tracking specific KPIs, you can show progress and identify places for continued refinement.

 

We help clients optimize their processes with a five-phase approach:

Value Stream Mapping

Logic20/20 creates value stream maps to help our clients visualize and evaluate the series of events that result in a specific product or service. Taking a long-range view of activities within your core business creates measurable, defined stages of opportunity that build upon one another to enhance the impact at each step.

 

Our approach to value stream mapping utilizes both a top-down and a bottom-up approach to distinguish value-add from non-value-add activities, offering a clear picture of the optimal areas for strategic cost cutting. By defining concurrent work streams and identifying crossovers in resource allocation and data utilization, we uncover opportunities for optimizing the return on every dollar spent. When the process is complete, you have a strategic plan for setting budgeting priorities across departments.

 

Sample value stream maps

Below is an example of how used value stream mapping to help a healthcare client streamline its patient services:

Value stream mapping enables you to

• Capture, define, and document input, outputs, and end-to-end activity for key operations

• Clearly define blockers or time gaps that prolong delivery cycles

• Offer leadership a view into parts of the business that are true marketplace differentiators

• Identify opportunities to utilize technology to enhance capability

• Establish consistent practice across geographic teams

• Reduce time to productivity for on-boarding new team members

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