Continuous Process Improvement

Businesses continuously evolve – with this business evolution driving changes to the supporting business processes. At times, business change occurs “all at once” – and a completely new or re-designed process is deployed. More often, the evolution occurs gradually.

When change occurs gradually, it’s often driven by the process participants via process workarounds, with process owners and managers unaware that the business needs and process are evolving. These small incremental changes often result in workarounds and exceptions to the official, standard process– with different employees taking different approaches to address the new business needs.

These small incremental changes add-up to significant business impact. Suddenly the actual business process is significantly different from the intended standard process – causing high variability and major impacts on performance and quality of the process. Some studies have found that up to 85% of process instances are workarounds from the official documented process.

For continuous improvement, it’s critical to monitor the execution of business processes, along with workforce activity, to identify and address process variations as they occur. These variations can indicate process errors and training issues, or more importantly, be an indicator that the underlying business needs have shifted.

Focus is the Platform for Continuous Process Improvement

Iontas Focus platform provides a foundation for continuous process improvement:

Our process visibility solutions monitor process activity to identify and analyze when new process flows and variations occur.
Management can be notified of process variations in real-time, as they happen. The cause for the variation can be quickly determined.
Our process consistency and control mechanisms can then quickly enable new process guidance as needed to reflect the business change.

Identify and Address Workarounds – As They Happen

With Focus, process improvement can be done quickly, in small increments, as the business needs evolve, ensuring that the process executed by the workforce meets the new business needs. These real-time process adjustments prevent the spread of inconsistencies and trial and error that often become adopted as unofficial workarounds.