The Impact of Poor Process Flow

Author

Simon Hopley

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This guy stapled a cheque to his shirt as he wanted to understand the process flow of dispatching a refund to a customer. He stood at a desk for over an hour until he got ‘picked up’ and keyed into the system, and then being whisked down to the mailroom to wait to be bagged and couriered across to another office, in a different county, where further admin (mostly checking) took place.

The flow showed that the cheque was handled by an admin team, 2 mailrooms, and travelled a total distance of 30 miles before being collected by the postal service a day after.

The guy was discovered many weeks later in the banking system – he’s never been the same since.

So, what did this exercise conclude? He found that there was an unnecessary waste in the process that could be eradicated with relative ease, improve the flow, and get the cheque to the customer faster whilst reducing the cost.

At this point, you can be forgiven for thinking, why? Why did a company implement such a poor process flow?

Poor process flows are rife. They may not have been to begin with, but over time processes change and are not always reviewed.

To help you identify poor process flows in your organization, I have listed out 5 contributors, which in my experience, cause a lot of pain for the customer, internal and external.

Poorly defined or badly implemented Process Ownership

Where Process owners are not defined, agreed, or even known (yes, some people don’t even know that they own a process), then there is no one responsible for the management of that process.

A Process owner must be a subject matter expert and, in a position, where they know and feel how the process is performing. The Process owner can communicate effectively with other teams who influence the process (or are a recipient of the process), and they engage well to change and have a mindset for improvement and implementation.

Not documenting and reviewing your process

You’ve heard the saying “you can’t see the wood for the trees”, right? Processes are the same. If you haven’t seen the process in action or don’t have the process documented, how do you know what’s happening and how good it is? More to the point, how do the Users know what the process is to follow?

Like the ‘cheque man’, you don’t know what’s going on in a process until you walk it, observe it, measure it and document it. Then have agreed periods where the process will be reviewed to identify any natural deviation that can creep in. Having a process drawn out on a wall with a group of people huddled around plotting the value and non-value-added activity, is vital to its long-term success.

Silos

These things are bad. But what are they? A silo could be described as a couple of things:

• Where multiple teams are involved in a process and each one contributes to the overall outcome, but these teams don’t work as ‘one’. Instead, they operate their own SLA’s, they are quite happy to pass work back ‘over the fence’ if it’s wrong, and they have very little consideration to the poor customer who just wants their product or service.
• Playing ‘ping-pong’ with the customer. For example, A customer may reach a contact center, and the contact center is trying to field the call out to a department. Department ‘A’ says that it isn’t for them to deal with. So, the contact center phone another department but they won’t deal with the customer as they can only access records for customers who live in the North of England and not the South.

Silos cause so many problems for the people who work the process, and the poor customer is the one that gets forgotten about.

Complexity

Some processes by the very nature are complex, but there are many processes I have reviewed that are unnecessarily complex. So, what are the contributors to a complex process?

• A complex process may have a network of separate steps or relationships, which somehow relate to each other and create an overall system. Each stream within the overall system must operate in harmony, otherwise, it will fall apart.
• Process variation. For example, a non-advised telesales agent has different products to inform the customer about. Each product operates differently, and the agent needs to use different systems to explain each product. In this case, the process isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just a company that has a complex suite of products that need to be accounted for.
• Lots of manual decision making. I have seen plenty of process flows within an abundance of diamond decision shapes, which reflects where a person needs to decide based on criteria set by the business. Often this criterion isn’t clearly documented or readily available, and it’s only a matter of time that the person will make the incorrect decision.

Systems that don’t do what the process requires

Great news! You’ve won a new client.

They are different from the rest of your clients and therefore require different processes. The bad news is that you have an inflexible system that costs you millions of pounds to change. You cannot adapt the system to meet the new client requirements and therefore, your team gets creative and implements workarounds until funding becomes available for a new system.

5 years later…. The result

• Increased headcount by 15% to absorb the extra handling time that the workarounds have created
• Incurred over £100,000 in operational losses due to ‘human errors’ (they weren’t really human errors though, were they)?
• Complaints about this client are 25% greater than any other client
• People “dread” taking calls from these customers in fear of making a mistake and ruining their quality score, which impacts their sales bonus.

I hope you’ve found this read both useful and enjoyable and will help you in your digital and process improvement journey.

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