Despite the array of exciting developments in the Batch Control Systems market over the past year, the industry has struggled. But as we enter into the second half of 2003, some industry observers are predicting that things are about to change, and that a much livelier market may well be in store for the coming year. Anticipating this trend, companies are starting to look for new business processes that will maximize their success as they ride the markets' turn.
Strategic planning and technology assessment firm, ARC Advisory Group, reported in 2002 that after a year of little growth, the Batch Control Systems market seems poised for expansion. According to ARC, the key to successfully leveraging this potential growth lies in manufacturing efficiency and flexibility. In a recent study, ARC vice president Asish Ghosh said, "Manufacturing efficiency and flexibility will be the key to meeting the needs of powerful mass merchandisers and consumers are demanding increased variety and quality."
While the thrust of ARC's report speaks to the emergence of new business opportunities for Batch Control Systems, the described increased need for manufacturing efficiency, flexibility, and consumer demand for quality also points to the considerable optimization potential of process management.
Process management is a disciplined, systematic approach to understanding, improving, and managing businesses, with the potential to yield substantial long-term benefits across departments and functional areas of any organization. With its potential to reduce risk, optimize resources, lower production costs, speed time-to-market and increase customer value and satisfaction, process management is becoming a key success factor for the manufacturing industry.
Process Management at a Glance
For many manufacturers, process management is first encountered as part of an ISO certification or as a critical component of quality improvement programs such as Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.
Requirements for each of these initiatives have driven companies to document their processes. At the same time, new process requirements are being mandated or undertaken to further drive efficiency and quality to new levels -- TREAD (Transportation Recall Enhancement Accountability and Documentation) Act compliance, Sarbanes-Oxley reporting, and best practices initiatives are all excellent examples of the mandates which require an understanding and detailed documentation of business processes.
The benefits of process management are achieved by linking an organization's process documentation activities with a comprehensive set of tools for process simulation and analysis. The result is a framework for process modeling and management across the enterprise also known as enterprise process management. This also creates a path to reduced defects, increased customer satisfaction and improved bottom-line financial performance.
The Value of a Process-Centric Approach
How can process management increase manufacturers' performance? Any activity that creates value for a company and its customers, whether it is a product or service, is linked within the company as part of interacting sets of processes. Processes are not only capable of creating value -- they also can reduce it by identifying duplication and redundancy. Six Sigma, one of today's leading quality improvement programs, demands recognition of both of these factors and a process-centric approach is the key to fully realizing the benefit of any Six Sigma initiative.
The true value of process management to manufacturers can be seen in an example from the automotive industry. Consider an automotive manufacturing company and the processes that drive its daily operations. There are interacting processes at many levels throughout the company, from the large scale manufacturing of a car to the mid-scale manufacturing of a bumper to the small scale bolting of the bumper to the car's chassis. It is the linkage of these processes that directly impacts operating costs and ultimately, customer satisfaction. Flawed processes or poor linkage of processes increases cycle times, makes products and services more expensive, creates defects, and ultimately reduces value to both customer and producer. For these reasons, auto manufacturers consider process management critical to strategic quality initiatives.
Implementing a Baseline Process Management Solution
To implement a process management initiative, a quality manager requires a tool set suited to the different demands of the four phases of process management: document, assess, improve and manage.
Phase one -- Document
The document phase creates a snapshot view of how the business operates. Existing documentation -- from initiatives such as ISO 9000, increasingly available in flowchart form -- provides a good starting point. Where such information does not exist, the time required to achieve this task can be minimized through process mapping and flowcharting.
Phase two -- Assess
Armed with information-rich flowcharts and process, quality managers identify and quantify potential payback opportunities.
Phase three -- Improve
During the improve stage, the goal is to evaluate how an organization's resources, such as personnel, equipment, and facilities, can be used most efficiently. The most common goals of process improvement include reducing or eliminating costs, shortening cycle-time or time-to-market, and improving product quality -- which can be a function of time, cost, and service, or the product itself.
Phase four -- Manage
Process management exposes valuable information on the health of a business. It yields knowledge and insight into processes, redefines required performance levels, creates an understanding of their interdependencies, and above all, exposes deficiencies. The final phase does not represent an end in itself. The goal of this phase is the deployment of change across the enterprise. Controlling and optimizing processes is an ongoing activity to ensure the organization continues moving toward increasing levels of excellence by constantly reducing variations in processes.
Tools For the Process Management Trade
Clearly a key demand driven by the four phases of process management is finding the best possible process management software tools that can carry a process manager through all four phases. A variety of software solutions are available to meet this demand, but selecting the appropriate process management software solution presents its own set of challenges.
Specifically, as ISO, Lean, Six Sigma and other requirements for process documentation have arisen over time, individual programs have been developed to meet them. Today, the manufacturing industry has found almost no leverage between programs at major manufacturers, with disparate documentation tools and standards, and little thought to collaboration or sharing the information.
Fortunately, some vendors of process management software have answered these challenges with comprehensive process solutions. For example, Corel Corporation and its iGrafx family of process management solutions offers a range of proven, easy-to-learn process management solutions that allow corporations to document best practices and disseminate them for companywide implementation. This is a key capability, since iGrafx is specifically developed to answer manufacturers' demands for a solution that can contribute to the fusion of quality and process improvement initiatives such as ISO, Lean, and Six Sigma by readily capturing and sharing process documentation.
Corel's iGrafx product line has been developed to reflect the four phases of process management. Each of the phases -- document, assess, improve, and manage -- presents distinct challenges that can be met with a corresponding strategy, and in the case of Corel iGrafx, an appropriate process management tool.
NASA's Kennedy Space Center implemented a process documentation project in order to meet ISO certification requirements. A recent Corel Corp case study examined the use of iGrafx FlowCharter for the document phase of this process management implementation.
Ted Drake, head of Business Documentation at Kennedy Space Center, summed up flowcharting's potential for documenting the critical processes at NASA: "Flowcharting is a simple, visual methodology that makes content simple to update and extremely easy for anyone to access across our network. We used to have rooms stacked with huge binders full of paper documentation. We introduced flowcharting and replaced procedural documents of 50 text pages with flowcharts of only three. Since then we have filled a lot of dumpsters."
iGrafx FlowCharter's flowcharting capabilities enable the inclusion of metrics that quantify the performance, cycle-times and error rates of processes. This is a critical capability since it enables a broad variety of process simulation and analysis capabilities in the next level of iGrafx tools, iGrafx Process and iGrafx Process for Six Sigma -- a set of process simulation and analysis products that match the assess and improve phases of the process management methodology.
"Manage" is the last phase of the process management methodology, and it faces the daunting challenge of cross-program collaboration or information sharing. Information-gathering capabilities that integrate easily with an organization's existing workflows are essential to the overall management of the collaborative process. Corel's iGrafx Process Central retains all process documentation, offers easy user access, collaborative annotation features and versioning controls, and enables users to produce outputs in multiple formats -- key capabilities for quality managers working across cross-functional or platform boundaries.
Process tools meet the demands of the manufacturing industry's key quality initiatives by tying together disparate process documentation that organizations already have in place. For this reason, process management continues to gather momentum as a powerful strategic methodology for improving manufacturing efficiency and flexibility.
A recent Corel Corp white paper summarized the potential of process management within the automotive industry:
"In moving ever deeper into a formal process-oriented approach, automotive manufacturers and suppliers have the opportunity to radically change the way they do business -- to streamline, control and correlate business processes and their documentation, realize time and cost efficiencies, boost productivity and drive customer satisfaction. If they fulfill this opportunity -- by leveraging the quality systems they have already implemented and adopting advanced process management tools -- they will not only overcome the pressures of a competitive marketplace, but gain a new, global competitive advantage."
The same statement applies to manufacturers in other sectors. So does the same opportunity.
As Corel Corporation's vice president, iGrafx Process Solutions, Edward Maddock has over 10 years' experience in developing, deploying, and supporting enterprise process management solutions.
