Reality isn’t the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are – Robert J. Ringer
When we talk about process improvement in the context of outsourcing (or even outside the context of outsourcing), we imagine these clean, neat processes that are just lying there waiting to be improved by our golden touch. Often they are just like sausage; you don’t want to watch them being made!
Processes, for the most part in most companies, have evolved over time just by someone deciding to do something one way.It gets added upon, modified and steps deleted, for whatever reason.
Information systems within companies used for executing processes have their own stories and reality is that in most cases, it’s an ugly mix of different software systems installed at different points of time in a company’s history. They are often slapped together with all kinds of sticks and glue. In many companies, it is a daily miracle it all works together!
If you take a typical order-to-cash cycle that any company’s main process is (from the time someone places an order for something to be made or sold to them, until the thing is made and shipped and cash received from the customer), it consists of a spaghetti of different manual and automated steps, some of them paper based, some of them software based. As time goes on, the manual steps get automated with internal software development or software products bought externally. Even in the largest companies (and especially in the largest companies) they may use SAP for manufacturing, Oracle for financials and PeopleSoft for HR. Making information flow from one to another in an order-to-cash cycle is hard enough; forget having visibility into how a process flows from one end to another. It is pretty impossible to get a sense of typical cycle time for any given order given the different systems that are used in its path!
There comes a time when enterprise application integration (EAI) suites or process orchestration software glues all of them together, some well, some with duct tape, unitl it all works like some fantastic Rube Goldberg Machine .
Add to this the pressure to outsource or offshore, quite often parts of this business process that are not automated but that have heavy manual components to them. And many of the processes we see on a daily basis have them – whether you are applying for a loan or a mortgage, buying auto or life insurance policy or filing a claim for an accident that you had. We all imagine a smooth machine that chugs behind the scenes making things flow seamlessly from one logical step to another.
Intuitively we know that this CANNOT be true since the more you computerize something, the longer it seems to take – 4 weeks? 6 weeks? 8 weeks?
CIOs and technical people can get an accurate picture of the Rube Goldberg contraptions that are the technology solutions behind the scenes for most processes. If they can improve those at the back end, it can AUTOMATICALLY contribute a lot to process improvement.
Process improvement is not very divorced from the technology reality behind the scenes. In many cases, the Wizard behind the curtain is a sneezing, wheezing, ready-to-break-down set of wheels and cogs. Improving the behind-the-scenes technology can contribute to process improvement as much as detailed Six Sigma analysis of Average Handle times with Minitab!
More than just a technology person or just a Six Sigma person, a technology person with a Six Sigma background can do wonders with process improvement, given the realities of information systems used in a typical company!
