ISO 9000, lean, lean manufacturing, lean management, six sigma, team building, problem solving, process management are specialities of Quantum Associates, Inc, Chicago area. Quantum Associates, Inc
Certified Minority Business Enterprise
                 "Providing Solutions For Creating Customer Value"

Our mission is to anticipate and meet the process improvement and training needs of our clients with integrity, creativity, and a passion for adding value.

 

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Process Management


ISO 9000 Lean Management Six Sigma Process Management Team Building

 

"“If you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you do not know what you are doing.” -W. Edwards Deming

Basic Business Statistics Course Now Available

Process Improvement For Administrative Departments
 By Willie L. Carter  - Available on Amazon.com  

Imagine how much more efficient your administrative or office processes would be if they treated downstream departments as customers.

This book provides 11 simple steps to help you improve collaboration and communication between your administrative departments. The book demonstrates real world tools and techniques to improve departmental processes by focusing on the customers of those processes.

Get Your Copy Today. Clicking on the title will take you to Amazon.

"A very easy read, nicely laid out and to the point. I like the exercise approach as it gets one thinking. You raise lots of things to get the best out of the book. Good book to give to some of my clients." ~ W. Evans

“In his book Willie Carter has identified the process not the individual worker that blocks improved efficiency. This short read is an easy to follow guideline to improving productivity, while fostering teamwork and cooperation within an organization. Everyone becomes part of the solution to provide the best end product. I think this is a must read for any company or organization.” ~ John Nixon, Chicago, IL

 

What Is Process Management?

Process management really refers to process analysis and is composed of the following:

  •  Defining a work process, with input from suppliers and outputs to customers

  •  Describing how a process really works

  •  Tracking and analyzing process performance

  •  Redesigning or optimizing a process to improve its performance

Process management emphasizes customer needs and what the business must do to deliver the product or service to the customer, rather than on how well the individual functions perform. Companies that manage their operations by focusing on customer-oriented processes do a much better job of putting customer needs first because process performance is measured in ways that support customer expectations.

Our Process Analysis  program includes training and facilitation in process mapping, process redesign, and process value add analysis. Quantum Associates Business Process Management support has helped many companies reduce their cycle times and improve customer satisfaction.

Key Benefits

  •  Enables your organization to focus on the customer

  •  Enhances your ability to compete by improving the use of available resources

  •  Provides your organization with a measure of waste

  •  Allows your organization to predict and control change

 

Our Capabilities

Business Process Mapping and Redesign   We help identify and gather information about your process before generating the process map.

Cross functional process mapping focuses on cycle time reduction—reducing the time for one cycle of work to be completed (for example, from the time a request for quote is received to the time service is provided or the product is shipped). An additional benefit is that it empowers employees at all levels to be personally responsible for customer satisfaction. What make this methodology better than many others you may have tried are results? Dramatic results occur with committed and creative teamwork.

The key to cycle time reduction is determining which steps in your process add value in the eyes of the customer. Walking in the shoes of the customer both changes your perspective and your solutions. It enables your whole team to see the entire process and how it relates to the customer. Focusing on the customer does not mean adding or deleting steps that you think might be important to your customers. You must first take the time to gather the voice of your customers and determine their expectations of your process. Click on this example of a macro-map to truly see value-added steps. click on the link below for some helpful business process mapping hints.

"My department contracted Quantum Associates to perform a process mapping exercise with the goal of reducing inefficiency. The work was textbook perfect...I was initially skeptical of the value-add model used by Quantum, but I must concede this methodology was a good choice for my area". ~ Delivery Services Manager for a $53 billion Healthcare firm.

Business Process Mapping Hints

Why Map a Process?

A process map helps make work visible. Increased visibility improves communication and understanding, and provides a common frame of reference for those involved with the process. Process maps are often used to show how work gets done in your organization. When used in this way, they represent a snapshot in time that shows the specific combination of functions, steps, inputs, and outputs that your organization uses to provide value to your customers. Thus business process maps help you document your current pathways to customer satisfaction. Analysis of the processes which the maps represent can help you increase customer value by identifying activities to reduce process cycle time, reduce defects, reduce costs, establish customer driven performance measures, reduce non-value-added steps, and increase productivity.

For example, we helped create a cross functional process map of one of our distribution clients incoming material receiving process. The map showed that the receiving process consisted of many more steps than anyone had previously thought. and that their were few performance measures in place. Each manufacturer had its own way of packing and shipping products. This caused our client to adapt its process to each manufacturer, which in essence, established multiple processes for the same basic function - that for receiving and verifying incoming orders. A review of the steps in the process showed many to be rework or non-value-added. This convinced our client to reduce the non-value-added steps and to establish measures to track timeliness and accuracy of incoming shipments data in order to provide feedback to the shippers of the incoming material.

Cross-Functional Process Mapping

Imagine producing a product or service in half the time it currently takes!

Reduce the total cycle time in your value delivery processes. The primary tool needed to achieve total cycle time reduction is cross-functional process mapping. We help you create "As Is" and "Should Be" maps to eliminate non-value added steps and redefine the remaining value added steps to improve process efficiency.

For every 25% reduction in cycle time you can double your productivity resulting in as much as a 20% reduction in costs.

We address the critical business issues in mapping your business processes by developing an exhaustive list of process issues impacting cycle time. These issues become action items for you to focus on in creating your "Should Be" state.

Is your company doing all it can to make sure your customers are being satisfied?

Because you are so involved in the day-to-day operations of your organization you forget the primary rule of doing business: provide value for the customer. Our team of external domain experts (over 100 years aggregate experience in business improvement) can provide the training and education vital for successful progress in today's global competitive environment.

"Quantum Associates was very knowledgeable in process mapping and very passionate about improving our financial reporting processes." - President for a  Mid-sized Construction Firm

Process Management White Papers

Becoming a Process Focused Organization 
Focused process improvement is a fundamental requirement to sustain initiatives like quality or lean and to generate positive results. Organizations succeed or fail based on what happens within specific key business processes. Many organizations don’t sustain their quality or lean efforts because they are not focused on improving critical business processes. Instead employee improvement teams are left adrift and end up working on trivial, inconsequential projects that matters least to improving the business... (Read More)

Sample Process Maps (click on the links below)

Process Improvement for Administrative Departments Consulting/Training

Many times organizations overlook the importance of collaboration and communication between their administrative departments. Work is completed by one department and “thrown over the wall” to the other department with total disregard for the needs or requirements of the department to whom the work is handed off.

With this type of mindset poor quality documents, information, and data leads to rework and wasted time which ultimately impacts the delivery of services or products to the external customer—“the one who pays the bills.”

Administrative departments need to create a new mindset in which they view downstream departments as their customers because they truly are their internal customers. This approach is remarkably evident if you think of the work you do as a process. In process thinking you receive an input from a supplier which you transform into a product or service for your downstream customer. Your goal as the processor department is to make sure your downstream customer is satisfied every single time.

This training is designed to provide your staff, with proven real world tools and techniques to improve their work processes and thereby satisfy their internal customers. The  training workshop is a systematic approach to process improvement. It gives administrative teams a practical model and set of tools for analyzing and redesigning their work.

The disciplined application of the entire methodology leads to sustained improvement in administrative processes. Benefits include:

  •  Reduced fire-fighting

  •  Better collaboration between the major work groups within the organization

  •  Clarification of work priorities

  •  Systematic identification and removal of the root cause of problems

  •  Fact-based decision making

  •  Prevention of problems

"Our Quality Team needed to refocus on some fundamentals of problem solving. Knowing the professionalism and quality of Willie's work effort, I called upon Quantum Associates to conduct a two day problem solving training session. All of our participants learned practical tools and approaches that are now helping them serve their internal customers at a higher level of process improvement."– Vice President Quality & Regulatory for a Pharmacy Benefit Management Organization

make the right choice! Contact us today to learn more about how our process management services can help you reduce cycle time  and improve process efficiency. You'll be glad you did.

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Last modified: 01/13/2010