Process Improvement

When you’re juggling a million daily tasks, it’s tempting to think continuous process improvement in business is a nice-to-have goal instead of essential work. Here’s why you need to put it on the front burner according to business titan Bill Gates: “A lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires.” Be like Bill. Explore how a commitment to process improvement can actually save time, reduce costs, improve quality, and more – even if you’re not gunning to be the next Microsoft.

Business process improvement sounds like such an elegant, straightforward concept: You simply identify, analyze, and improve current business processes to strengthen performance, hit best-practice standards, and boost the end-user experience. When you’re done, you’ll enjoy higher productivity and efficiency while cutting down on errors and waste. What could go wrong?

“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.” That’s attributed to Albert Einstein, arguably the world’s greatest physicist to date and inarguably a genius who clearly had the mindset of a process improvement manager. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what process improvement managers do for businesses, which brings us to the questions du jour: What is process improvement in business, and how can it help?

You want your team to be as productive as possible, and that means reducing waste. What do we waste a lot of? Time. Most organizations lose time to everything from inefficient meetings to outdated processes. But if you know how to wisely allocate your team’s time, you’ll be better prepared to meet deadlines, increase productivity, and attract top employees. Let’s take a closer look at how time management drives business process improvement.

If your organization has made great strides in its improvement program, but you’re still not delivering that string of innovations you expected, maybe your approach to Lean Six Sigma is missing a secret element – creativity. For even a black-and-white problem there could be a kaleidoscope of possible solutions. That’s why process improvement depends on creative thinking. Let’s look at how unleashing your imagination within the well-defined methods of quality improvement can help you achieve high-return breakthroughs.  

When American business titan Jack Welch died March 1, 2020, it signaled a milestone moment to reevaluate the innovations that earned Welch Fortune magazine’s “Manager of the Century” title. Perhaps his most enduring legacy will be his early adoption of Lean Six Sigma Principles. If you’re ready to learn more about titan-worthy streamlining methods that you can apply to your own enterprise, explore three process improvement techniques to boost work efficiency and produce real results where you work.