Lessons Learned System -BP

Unifying Your Business Processes

Some organizations explode in bursts of growth. Others find that in response to market stresses and opportunities their fundamental direction changes. Still others find their organization dealing internally with differing and conflicting business processes, cultures and mores that are suddenly thrust together through mergers and acquisitions. In all cases, the dynamics that are produced by those inconsistently applied or conflicting business processes inevitably serve as a springboard for confusion and a generator of losses. The REASON Root Cause Analysis and Lessons Learned System provides the technology and a practical solution to this common problem that is shared among many small, medium sized and large organizations.

Taking the right steps

Step one is to establish a consistent and repeatable method for investigating issues and organizing this data (which is required to make it possible to have visibility of your business processes) from all of the different operations.

By focusing your efforts on the counter-quality issues in your different organizational units, the patterns in policies and procedures that have generated and permitted these problems will be pinpointed. However, without data that is consistent in quality and organization from the different locations, there can be no reliable basis for the level of trending analysis necessary to identify and understand the interaction of your business processes. While it may seem obvious that the uniformity and quality of the event-data dictates how meaningful a trending analyses can be, it is surprising how many organizations permit their various operations centers to use different approaches and conflicting ways of thinking to resolve their problems. Doing this prevents these organizations from easily being able to bring the organization’s event data together to see the ‘big picture.’

Step two involves linking specific offending business processes to goals and strategies. At the most basic level, the goals of an organization are achieved through its strategies which are in turn accomplished through its business processes. Using this linking, organizations within the REASON® system can monitor how and to what degree counter-quality is impacting corporate strategies and goals and what business processes are failing or missing to control operations. Using the linkage between goals and strategies to business processes provides in REASON® direct visibility of the business processes in need of improvement, and accordingly, a new visibility of avenues to improve the progress toward the fundamental goals of the organization.

A Global Dilemma

A few years ago, the world’s largest printing company was built through acquiring major printing companies spanning the globe. How do you bring order to over one hundred different facilities and dozens of companies around the world and still retain respectful and flexible restrictions that will observe their cultural differences? Ways of doing things, priorities, preferences, social customs, and cultural differences all combined to present the company with a most daunting task. Global unification of business processes became one of this corporation’s primary goals. Their solution was to adopt the REASON Root Cause Analysis and Lessons Learned Technology. It was the appropriate solution because REASON® addressed all of their needs. They needed a standardized means for solving all different kinds of problems that could be applied by all different kinds of employees. They needed a system that would document the problem and its solution in a unified data format to support analysis. They needed a system that would enable all facilities to easily input and share knowledge. Through REASON® when the organization came together to solve problems---they all are talking the same ‘language’, thinking the same way, and using the same tool. This was seen as an important first step in unifying the newly merged organization.

Through the unique capabilities of REASON each facility and key personnel combined to form a company network of knowledge. The REASON Lessons Learned System automatically monitors daily all of the incoming information about problems that have occurred within the company across the world. Key personnel can submit to the system data profiles that identify all of the important issues that directly affect their job responsibilities. When REASON spots a match between a profile and the details of a reported problem, it immediately alerts the individual with a summary of the problem. In minutes, the vital new knowledge is accessible to the persons who need the information the most to head off a developing problem or to resolve an existing issue in their area. Corporate analyses enable the executive management of the company to identify and understand the exact causal influences within the policies and procedures that permitted and generated the problem. The micro view of exact causal factors and the unified macro view of problems around the world enable the corporation to accomplish its essential goals: to deal with exact causal influences by unifying processes, while being aware of and sensitive to the uniqueness of each operations environment. Analysis of global patterns and trending provide new insights to operations improvement opportunities.

Operations on the Grow

The executive managers of rapidly growing organizations have special concerns associated with bringing in new processes, expanding existing functions, securing facilities and equipment, hiring and training personnel. There are many functions that can be flexibly controlled to accommodate different environments, but problem solving and data gathering are not among them. As an organization grows, new business processes may be called for, and there will be business processes that must be formalized or modified in response to the changes. Critical to the ability to detect and manage the need for unified policies, is the ability to view and understand how the business processes in place are influencing counter-quality. By setting in the REASON Root Cause Analysis and Lessons Learned System, you establish a standard method, language and tool that all of your personnel can use to identify the systemic root causes of operations problems. The resulting data on problems and their solutions flow automatically to the Lessons Learned System that will then reveal opportunities to establish, apply or modify policies in order to unify business processes within the organization.

Organizations That Grow Fast

Those organizations that just grow from more modest beginnings will find that REASON Lessons Learned provides them with a unique and practical tool to pinpoint the need for more formal controls and to provide guidance in what aspects of the process should be targeted and included for policy and procedure controls. REASON is a practical and cost-effective tool. It provides one system that can be applied to all organizational problems: product quality, maintenance, safety, transportation, purchasing, personnel, sales and legal issues. One of the major advantages that comes to small businesses is the visibility and understanding of causal interaction that commonly exists between internal disciplines and processes. Inadequate business processes often are associated with pervasive problems that can be shown to exist throughout the organization. REASON provides the one technology and tool to broadly improve operations.

For more information about how REASON can be deployed as an operations improvement tool to unify and upgrade your business processes, please call (903) 236 9973.