Fit for Growth

10Process ExcellenceSimplify Work and Minimize Bureaucracy

Process excellence advances a Fit for Growth transformation by optimizing processes to achieve sustainable efficiency and effectiveness while supporting differentiating capabilities. It takes a market-back view to identify the real sources of customer value in a product or service, determines which processes create that value, and simplifies or eliminates other processes. Process excellence improvements often leverage tools such as Lean, Six Sigma, and others, but the approach differs from these familiar continuous-improvement methods in important ways. Traditional methods work within existing structures to foster incremental, evolutionary improvement from the bottom up, independent of what the rest of the business may be doing. By contrast, process excellence applies a market-driven perspective to create a blueprint of the four macro business processes found in every company—innovation, sales and marketing, delivery, and support—and how they interact to deliver the targeted customer-value proposition (see Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1

Then it takes a “fit for purpose” approach to select the right mix of techniques, and optimize and re-base the remaining sub-processes. This unique approach to simplifying entire parts of the business and core operations often releases sufficient cash savings to help self-fund the creation ...