Ever tried to read an 8-foot-long process map and wondered how much productivity was lost during the creation and if it would really make a difference? In most cases, process mapping needs to detour and focus on redesigning the work instead.
Revealing where processes are broken helps show why a unit or enterprise isn’t meeting its goals and isn’t realizing ROI from management consulting. But you’ve also seen the results of frustrated managers trying to business map sometimes hard-to-describe processes. What is the deliverable? Who assigns what? Who approves what? Who is the actual decision-maker?
Process redesign savings
At a biopharmaceuticals company we worked with, one division realized a cost savings of $175,000 during the first year it implemented 13 process redesigns. It discovered during our Rapid Work Redesign session that it actually had no documented processes to speak of—one reason the division performed like a sieve, draining away time and money.
Here’s the big question: Who has time in today’s global marketplace to figure out such questions over weeks or even months? Our approach takes the as-is process mapping phase down to a day in most cases. And it typically helps teams design the to-be process in 20% of the time that other process mapping methods take—and with better quality.
By taking leaders through the work redesign in a session where they also learn to replicate them with their entire teams, this method works across industries, across continents, and across systems of all kinds. And they often see results almost immediately. Shouldn’t your process mapping make a detour and redesign the work for better results?
