The Process Approach

Let's revisit what exactly the word "process", which we hear in so many places in daily life, really means.

If you search for the word on Google, you will find several meanings. Some of them: "The course of an event or events, or of operations, toward a certain result, developing and taking shape through changes that regularly follow one another." As a philosophical term: "A flow of thought that reaches a certain conclusion." If we want a mathematical definition, we can say: "A process is a function. It is the function f(x)=y that maps each element (x) of set A to an element (y) of another set B."
Let's reinforce this with an example. A paper mill that maps a tree in the forest set to a notebook in the stationery set is the function connecting these two sets.

So what is the function that maps a request in your Customer Requests set to a product in your Products or Services set? Your company's name? Definitely not.

"It is the name you give to the sum of all decisions taken and activities carried out by the relevant stakeholders to turn a request from your customer into a service or product."

The equation of this function is something like our corporate identity. It can tell us how we do business, who our customers are, what our relationships with them look like and whether we are efficient. The equation is valid only for you; it means nothing for another organization or company.
 

Every organization, institution or company is like a living organism. It needs to develop, nourish and protect itself and adapt to the outside world. Like a living being, it thinks, develops strategies, makes decisions, implements them and gets results. So what is the purpose of a living being? The answer may be survival, but for a complex being like a human it is much more than that. For many people, making dreams come true is an important reason to live.
 

So is our company striving just to survive, like simple organisms, or to have dreams and make them come true?

Your company's dreams are its vision, and as the owner of the company, that vision is your dream. The answer is this: as you dream and develop a vision, your company gains dreams and strives to survive in that direction. If you only want to survive, your company will only try to survive. It has been statistically proven that companies with a vision, operating in line with that vision, succeed and grow. Most companies without a vision, the ones that say "we'll take any job", have been doomed to disappear because they could not offer their customers high-value products and services.

Based on what I have said so far, we can start looking for an answer to the question of how to identify the functions of our own organization (from now on I will call them processes). Just as there are different types of functions in mathematics, we can group our processes under different headings. All the activities that start the moment a customer request touches your company and end where that request, having taken shape with you, reaches your customer as a product or service are your core processes. They all depend on one another, and if one of them is missing you can never return to the customer with a product or service. The processes in which you analyze and build strategies to keep the activities of your core processes stable and more efficient are your support processes.

For example, your Production process is a core process, while your Maintenance and Repair process is a support process that exists to fix and prevent disruptions that may occur in production.

So why should we define our processes and group all our activities under them?

The answer is very simple: "To find out whether all the effort needed to deliver our product and service is worth it." Managing an organization is hard. As your business grows, everything becomes more complex and you have to put in much more effort. Picture yourself stuck in a swamp. All the effort you make to get out reflects the effort you make in your company to get through the day. If you did not sink today, you have to try even harder not to sink tomorrow. But eventually your strength will run out and you will disappear into the swamp.
This fate is not unique to you.

It applies to every company that fails to institutionalize. All the effort you put into getting through the day makes you forget the situation you are in, that you are stuck in a swamp and slowly sinking. When you finally notice, your strength is gone; you lean back to rest, look at yourself and all your activities from a distance and see where you are and in what state. You usually find out whether your activity was worth it by looking at your cash at the end of the year, and looking at your operating profit you say things in the past tense like, "If only I had prioritized some customers' requests, I would have earned more."

" You should define your processes not to build new strategies for what has already happened, but to learn from experience and develop strategies for likely possibilities, identify your risks by mapping good and bad scenarios, and make the right decisions. "

What do we gain by defining our processes?

The ability to "control". You can see and intervene in the activities of the resources and other stakeholders that deliver your product and service. You can stop them, speed them up and even improve them. You can learn how much they cost you and how much money they will earn you. Best of all, you can do this in real time.

For example, you know that all resources in your company exist to deliver products and services, and you pay for those services, which is a cost. Imagine being able to monitor whether an employee you pay for 9 hours a day actually works 9 hours. If this employee takes part in an activity in any of your processes, and that task should take 9 hours, a few questions should come to mind.

For example, "Was this task completed by the end of the day?" or "If not, was the employee assigned to an activity in another process?" If the answers are no, there are two likely explanations. Either your employee was assigned to another activity whose process is not defined, which is why you cannot track it, or your employee overdid the coffee break somewhere. This may sound like science fiction, but this perspective, and much more, has existed since the 1980s.

Where to Start?

I would say you should start at the point where you become aware of what this approach will give you. If you say, " I want full control over my organization. I want to monitor every activity, know its purpose, see whether it is profitable or not, and when I make a decision, I want at least my risks and the good and bad scenarios laid out in front of me mathematically, " then you have taken your first step toward "management by processes".

At the beginning of this article I gave some definitions of a process. Now let's look at the components that make up a process. We will start with discovering a process and look for answers to a few questions. Let's begin:

Where does this process start and where does it end?

It can start from any task and end at any of the tasks that follow it. Example: it starts with the task of receiving an order and putting it into production, and ends with the task of delivering it as a product or service.

What triggers a process?

No task starts by itself; there must be a reason. That reason is an Input whose source is waiting for the result your tasks will produce. Example: an order.

Where do these triggers come from, and where do the results go?

The triggers that start a process come from sources that want to respond to their customers. The results go to customers. Sometimes the source itself can also be the customer of the process. Example: orders from your customers may ask you to ship the products either to them or to another customer they specify.

What is the purpose of this process?

To be the bridge between the request that starts the process and the customers waiting for a result, and in return to be rewarded for the service. Example: in your Sales process, the input is the Request and the output may be customer satisfaction.

Who is responsible for this process?

The person who is accountable when expectations are not met and customers are not satisfied. Example: whoever is responsible for managing the process, whether a director, manager, supervisor, foreman or whoever has been assigned. In my example, let the Sales Manager be our lead decision-maker. (Process ownership is often misunderstood; I will cover it in more detail in future articles.)

You may think the example I gave for the questions above is a sales process, but how you define your sales process, where it starts and ends, can vary depending on how you do business. A company's sales process is a broad, comprehensive process that contains many sub-processes. You too can define your processes with questions like these.

In summary, let's list the elements that make up a process.

• Supplier (Suppliers)
• Input (Input)
• Process (Process)
• Output (Output)
• Customer (Customers )

I wrote the English terms because when you research this topic later, you will come across it as the SIPOC Diagram.

In addition to these 5 essential elements, we can call any structure that has a purpose and an owner a process. With a diagram like the one above, you can define its purpose, owner, inputs and outputs, operations, suppliers and customers. We can define the expected quality of the outputs. To understand whether our process runs efficiently and in line with our quality, we can set performance measurement points (Key Performance Indicator - KPI). When something bothers us, we can hold the process owner responsible for managing this process accountable.

We can supervise the resources assigned to tasks and measure their performance. We can see which request of which customer we fulfilled and how, who was involved, whether we produced a product or service that meets the customer's expectations, and ultimately what all this effort cost us, and we can answer the question I raised at the start: whether the service I offer my customer was worth it.

Your processes are now defined, owned and have purposes aligned with your vision. You can monitor them, intervene, and even find ways to prevent problems before they occur. Most importantly, you can see. Instead of falling into another swamp and fighting to get through the day, you can now develop decisions and strategies in line with your vision.

If I answered the question "what is the process approach?" with " It is the art of untangling the knots where goals, tasks, decisions and responsibilities become intertwined, " I don't think I would be wrong.

Until my next article, goodbye.

Yasin Kürşad Bahadır

Sources

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/process-improvement
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/process-optimization
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/business-process-management