Business Process Improvement: Distributor Loading Procedure
In a recent Distributor’s Meeting held at the meat processing plant I work for, our business partners brought up their concern on the loading procedure/process. Apparently, what had worked for a good number of years in terms of loading efficiency is not anymore applicable in meeting the demands of the market. Immediately after the meeting, the Management team convened to streamline the process and resolve the issues raised. The loading process was top priority since this directly affects the time and motion of the business partners. Any delay that the process caused, results to poor customer service thus decreasing opportunities to gain income.
Business process streamlining, according to JM Associates (n.d.), involves the improvement of the whole process by improving each step as compared to drastically changing the whole process (business process reengineering). In this case, it was not necessary to come up with a new process altogether. Instead, steps were undertaken to sufficiently and efficiently assess the loading process. These steps included the following: process mapping, analysis, process redesign, acquisition of resources, implementation, and review (Mind Tools, 2014). By following these steps in the assessment of the loading process, the team was able to determine the necessary departments involved in the streamlining. Identified were the Sales Department, Logistics Department and Security Department. All three were involved from the order taking to the actual loading down to the final auditing of the loaded merchandise. These three departments helped in outlining the actual loading process (a flowchart was created), discussion of the sub-processes involved per step and the necessary revisions and finally in implementation of the revisions. We were mindful of the questions raised during the Distributor’s meeting, which served as a guide as to what questions we were to ask ourselves. We asked ourselves where the problem starts (what the root cause of the problem was), what causes bottlenecks in the existing process (its causes and effects), and what we can revise about the process (to eliminate identified problems). To continue, we also asked ourselves what resources we needed to carry out the implementation (according to an established timeline) and what we can do to review or assess the revisions in order to find out if the revisions will actually iron out the problems in the first place. The review or assessment step is essential in determining the effectivity of the changes implemented. All departments involved should constantly be asked of updates and relevant feedbacks to be able to adapt continuous improvements along the way.
References
JM Associates. (n.d.). Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Retrieved from
http://www.breakthrough-thinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ bpr_overview _2008may01.pdf
Mind Tools. (2014). Improving Business Processes. Retrieved from http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/improving-business-processes.htm
