In the last few posts, we've discussed the importance of processes to your business, as well as the basics of process documentation. One of the key benefits of having standard, documented processes is that it enables you to gain efficiencies for your business. But how do you leverage the process work you've done in order to achieve this?

To become more efficient, you first must understand where you currently stand. For example, how long does it take you to complete a given process? How much does it cost?

Which variable (time or cost) to focus on will depend on your business: service companies often find that measuring delivery time is effective, because time saved usually becomes profit as it can be re-invested into other billable activities; product companies, on the other hand, might prefer to look at a combination of time and cost, as both have a clear impact on their bottom line. Either way, the principles of measurement are the same: figure out how things are getting done today, in terms of time and/or cost (create a baseline), so that you can measure the impact of the improvements you make upon them tomorrow.

Here's how you do it. (In this example, we will look at measuring time; however, you can use cost if that is more appropriate to your business).

1. Select a single activity, and determine the start and end boundaries for it. Your process documentation should provide this information for you. We previously used the coffee shop example, in which our process map shows us the activity starts with greeting the customer and ends with delivery of the beverage order to the customer.
2. Track the time it takes to complete each task within the activity (Recall that each step in the process map represents a task within the overall activity). You can use the Process Baseline Calculator Jan 2011.xls to complete this step. Track the activity at least three to five times, in order to get a representative view of the time for the activity.
3. Review each task and identify those that take the longest to complete or that include the longest wait times. In the coffee shop example, perhaps making the beverage is the longest task in the process. This would be the task to focus on to improve your efficiency.
4. Identify improvement opportunities. Are there ways to re-organize how the work is done, how work flows from one person to the next, or the order tasks are completed in, to gain efficiency?
5. Implement your improvements and re-measure. Any gain in efficiency can be attributed to the changes you have implemented.

By using this process, you can make improvements to each individual activity that drives your business. In the next post, we'll look at how to identify which process to focus on first, to deliver the greatest benefit to your business overall.