What Is Business Process Improvement?

Business process improvement (BPI) is a valuable business strategy involving continuously improving products, services, and business processes. BPI can involve implementing new steps in business processes, as well as eliminating steps that are inefficient or unnecessarily expensive. Change is a regular occurrence in the business world, and BPI helps businesses adapt to that change.

Business process improvement is a regular habit rather than a one-time fix.

Integrating it into your business culture can help establish constant evaluation and analysis of processes to proactively identify areas for improvement. 

Who uses business process improvement and why?

Business process improvement can benefit everyone involved in a business and its processes. For example, BPI can benefit the customer service team by helping them find ways to provide better support to consumers, the design team by providing innovative design ideas, or product teams by improving quality during manufacturing. 

Businesses can use BPI to reach several different goals. Here are some potential use cases for business process improvement:

• Scaling: Growing businesses may face challenges when they attempt to scale effectively. For instance, these businesses can use BPI to identify opportunities to automate certain processes for a more efficient workflow.

• Product development: You can use BPI to find several areas where you can potentially reduce costs and increase production efficiency, such as more effectively utilizing resources, decreasing errors, and reducing labor costs.

• Job satisfaction: You can use proper business process improvement to make jobs easier and smoother, leading to a more enjoyable workplace with less turnover.

• HR automation: Human resources staff can use BPI to identify opportunities to automate processes, such as filing paperwork and notifying management of employee requests for professional development opportunities or vacation time.

Types of business process improvement methodologies 

When implementing business process improvement in your organization, you can choose from a variety of methodologies or strategies. Some approaches may better suit your goal, and in some cases, you might need to use a combination of methods to create a holistic plan.

Kaizen

BPI's Kaizen methodology focuses on increasing productivity and eliminating waste, with the ultimate goal of creating an environment of continuous improvement. The Kaizen approach encourages a consistent pattern of small, meaningful changes in business processes that make a big impact over time. 

To successfully implement Kaizen, you’ll need to create an organizational culture where employees actively identify and solve problems. This method involves identifying target areas, developing a strong understanding of the current process, collecting data to find wasteful activities, establishing a plan of action, and measuring the success of your actions by tracking key performance indicators.

Lean manufacturing

The Lean manufacturing methodology is based on eliminating waste during production. It can include correcting the improper use of raw materials, poor inventory management, inefficient logistics, or mismanagement of production resources, including staff and machinery. 

For effective Lean manufacturing, value stream mapping is used to identify which activities cause waste and which provide value. Then, use analytics to track how the steps of your process impact key performance indicators. Lastly, continuously monitor processes for waste and address issues as they arise.

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)

Plan-Do-Check-Act is a four-step process for continuous improvement of products, services, and processes. During “plan,” the first step of PDCA, you identify opportunities for positive change and create a plan of action. “Do” is the step in which you test out your plan on a small scale. The “check” step is the time to look at the test results to understand the possible implications. During the “act” step, you choose to go through with your plan if it was successful or go back to the beginning if it wasn’t.

Theory of Constraints

The Theory of Constraints methodology focuses on identifying your process's bottleneck, or primary limiting factor, so you can eliminate it. This strategy is a cycle with five steps: 

1. Identifying the constraint

2. Exploiting the constraint using existing resources

3. Adjusting other components of the process that may impact the constraint

4. Working to eliminate the constraint if previous steps failed until you find success

5. Repeating the process for continuous improvement.

Simply put, you identify and eliminate the bottleneck and then continue the cycle by finding the new primary limiting factor and addressing it.

Total Quality Management (TQM) 

TQM is a continuous improvement approach that emphasizes customer satisfaction. People using the TQM methodology make quality a priority of the overall organizational culture, focusing on delivering quality products and services to consumers. The key components of implementing TQM include:

• Focusing on the customer

• Encouraging continuous improvement

• Measuring performance

• Integrating operations

• Formulating strategies

• Utilizing analytics

• Making decisions based on facts

• Effectively communicating strategies with employees.

Benefits and challenges of business process improvement

You can experience many benefits from business process improvement, but you might also face some challenges. To implement business process improvement smoothly, consider the advantages it could bring to your business, as well as look out for potential issues.

Benefits

• Increased efficiency of processes

• Increased cost savings

• Improved scalability

• Higher rates of customer satisfaction

• Enhanced employee productivity

• Improvements to product quality

• Faster delivery

• Increased innovational ideas 

Challenges

• Ensuring the use of correct data

• Needing to set clear goals

• Preventing miscommunication of plans

• Avoiding too much focus on change instead of improvement

• Overcoming poor commitment from leadership or employees

How to create a business process improvement plan

To start utilizing business process improvement in your organization, pick which process you’d like to improve. Then, map out that process to understand how it works and what all the different parts are. After that, analyze the process to better identify what’s working and what’s not.

Once you have the full scope of the process, plan how to remove problem areas. Before fully implementing the plan, test the changes to see how they will ultimately impact the process and make any necessary adjustments. Lastly, implement your plan and monitor the results to see if things are improving as planned.

Getting started with Coursera

Explore Coursera to discover highly rated courses on improving business processes. Consider Lean Management Fundamentals from Starweaver to learn business process optimization, including how to identify and eliminate waste, analyze processes, and understand the role leadership plays in organizational success.

You can also develop business improvement skills through the Business Analysis Process course from Tableau Learning Partner, which includes learning to create visual models, analyze business problems, create business process documents, and implement solutions.