Implementing Continuous Improvement with Engage Process

More than ever, the current financial climate has driven countless organisations to re-evaluate their costs and ongoing internal efficiencies. Promoting continuous improvement in the workplace and streamlining working practices using a recognised tool is now an option considered by many.

Irrespective of whether you’re a government department or an SME, every organisation must acknowledge that they need to save costs and become more efficient in order to survive and evolve. Continuous improvement is important in the workplace because rather than making sporadic internal changes, striving toward continuous improvement is the key to increased efficiency, improved productivity and, ultimately, cost savings.

This drive to continuously improve is inevitably increasing the pressure on business process management, as processes should be continuously evaluated and updated to reflect these improvements. It’s now more important than ever for businesses to possess the right continuous improvement techniques to enable them to re-evaluate business processes in response to these increased demands for rapid change. 

Join us as we analyse examples of how continuous improvement can be implemented in the workplace using the features of the Engage Process tool. Engage Process is a dynamic, intuitive and affordable Process Management platform that offers organisations a solution for analysing ways to streamline working practices and implementing continuous improvement.

Most of us benefit from hybrid working, but often one of the potential challenges with continuous improvement, i.e. getting teams together to discuss and review processes, can be hampered by hybrid working. Organisations need to ensure their dispersed teams have tools at their disposal to support their requirement to brainstorm processes and then share information, as well as collate feedback. It may not always be possible to physically bring your team together in one room. However, using a tool such as Engage Process allows you to undertake process improvement workshops virtually as well as provide anyone in your organisation with access to the recorded processes, including the feedback, comments and suggestions.

Business processes must be continuously evaluated for potential improvements to ensure that they remain effective, this is best achieved in a Process Workshop. It’s important to involve operational staff in your Process Workshops, as well as your business process team. Together, you should be able to compare the performance data of your mapped processes (AS IS) with your business expectations (TO BE), to identify any areas for improvement. Concepts such as shortening lead times, performing actions in parallel, auditing the source, removing steps that don’t add customer value, combining or eliminating tasks, standardising, reducing batch sizes, etc. could all offer potential improvements. If all the data is mapped against your processes, then you can easily identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks in a process and create scenarios reflecting the proposed refinements.

Business Process Workshops are invaluable in exploring and refining existing processes and searching for bottlenecks and opportunities to improve. Using a modelling tool such as Engage Process, to map out and explore your processes will drastically reduce working time and not compromise the outcome.  As a team collaborating to complete the task, errors are minimised as processes are updated automatically, and any change resistance or concern is discussed and agreed upon.

How often do you go into a process meeting and not have everyone in the room or not have all the information available? It’s not always possible to identify the AS IS and determine TO BE in one single workshop. We can however identify the AS IS, start to model out the changes and, using Engage Process, your team can continue to work on elements of the process individually. Your team will likely be working on multiple business processes in parallel, so having sight of everything that may be relevant avoids costly rework.  

The Engage Process Teamboard offers the right balance of project management support within the tool, providing access to a shared virtual workspace for your team. This allows your team to see a snapshot of all activity in one place, review their actions and also ensure that the Process Lead has full control over process projects, making it much easier to manage tasks and deadlines.

In order to facilitate continual feedback, everyone involved in creating and refining the process should have access to the process at key stages. With Engage Process, you can export your processes to a digital handbook that is fully customisable, allowing anyone in the organisation access either via a browser or they can view them directly within the application via the Viewer. The built-in Feedback function, as well as a Brainstorm digital post-it note feature, offer further support for continuous improvement, providing your process teams with all the tools necessary to facilitate ongoing collaboration and teamwork.

We opened this article advocating the importance of continuous improvement, with particular focus on the current financial climate. However, whilst most would agree that process improvement should never be a one-off activity, in practice bringing your entire team together and collating the documentation required can be challenging. By working dynamically in real-time, the benefits are obvious from the start.

Engage Process offers a complete process management platform facilitating intuitive participation, brainstorming and feedback by capturing processes live, enabling easy collaboration for flexible tasks as well as compliance and risk management reporting. It is a SaaS product, with no plug-in requirements and available via an annual subscription.

Larmer Brown has been a Reseller and Services Partner for Engage Process since 2012 and the tool is regularly used by our own Consultants to accelerate process change during IT implementations.  More recently we have also used Engage Process to streamline course design prior to recording learning content.

With Engage Process seeing really is believing. If you can spare 10 minutes out of your day, we can show you just how easy it is to capture your processes using Engage Process with a one-to-one demonstration.