Process Improvement

Sterling Development drives operational and financial results through process improvement

A business is simply a collection of processes (activities) done to add value. Businesses are reliant on two things:

1. The people you employ, their skills and capabilities

2. The processes you use i.e. the way you do things.

Which means that the ways a business can perform better is to improve its people or its processes. Sterling Development can review your work processes to see how well they contribute to the achievement of your vison and strategies. What improvements, or redesign, of these processes are required to ensure they meet your customers requirements or create synergies among processes that cut across organisational boundaries and all supply chain partners?

Are your customers happy?

If everything your process does focuses on meeting what customer need, nothing more and nothing less and there is no way you could make it better. Then you have the perfect process. Process improvement is simply about changing the way you do things to meet customer needs. All process improvement does is refocus the processes back on giving your customers what they pay for.

Why is it so difficult?

The problem with process improvement is that too many organisations don’t focus on what the paying customer wants. Instead, they focus on what managers or owners want. All too often, they optimise around the wrong ‘customer’. At its heart, the problem with process improvement isn’t one of tools and techniques or methodologies. The real problem is an emotive one. How do you persuade managers to agree that they should focus their efforts on customers first and not shareholders, not bosses, not regulators and certainly not themselves?

How to Improve processes?

Sterling Development provides a step by step guide to managing process improvement. We conduct Brown Paper Process Flow Mapping and can align all processes to customer needs, employee objectives and all internal systems. Our approach considers your core work processes where we:

Decide critical customer delight factors for each process
Use the delight factors to redesign and improve processes
Monitor results to continuously improve and close gaps