Process improvement consulting is a discipline that uses established methods to identify, analyse and improve current business processes to satisfy new business goals and objectives, and thus create a new and improved set of future business processes.
External and/or internal benchmarks are a valuable asset for many process improvement consulting projects, provided you can ensure that you can truly establish an ‘apples with apples’ comparison.
For process improvements to endure, it’s typically necessary to monitor performance of the process and appoint a process owner who is responsible for ongoing management. Sometimes this may require a plan, a budget or a benchmark for the process. In other situations, an employee / team / workgroup incentive program to inspire process effectiveness may be needed.
Popular process improvement consulting categories
- Benchmarking – source, develop, evaluate and implement external and/or internal benchmarks as the points of reference
- Business process engineering – design and implement radical changes to processes to achieve significant improvements in critical areas such as cost, quality, service and response time
- Process improvement –implement process improvements that close performance gaps and remove process variation through streamlining, cycle time reduction and elimination of non-value-adding activities
- Process mapping and (re)design
Three success factors for a successful process improvement project
The clear number #1 success factor is establishing and communicating the business drivers for a process improvement consulting project before work starts. These are ‘people projects’ and your employees need to engage.
Number #2 is great change management. Please refer to our Change Management category page for tips and tricks.
And third is the availability of external benchmarks, or the ability to create your own internal benchmarks.
If you are ready to speak to a process improvement consultant for your needs, select the "Process Improvement" category in our quick online wizard.