Every Manager's Guide to Business Processes:

There is and can be no one "best" way of improving a process. Each of the process movements has its own goals and techniques that reflect on those goals. Business process reengineering, for instance, seeks radical change, and its tools emphasize, as the term reengineering suggests, using industrial engineering techniques to streamline and hub workflows. Total quality management aspires to continuous incremental improvement; its tools focus on streamlining processes. The learning organization aims to position a company for adaptation and innovation in an era of increasing change and flexibility; its process improvement efforts center around collaboration and teams rather than workflows. All of these processes are options for a firm.

As the main criterion for process investment, value is an economic concept of business processes as capital assets and liabilities. It is not the same as benefit; streamlining a process by taking out waste, reducing delays, and cutting staff may or may not generate the most value for the firm. The choice of value builder is thus a management decision.

Abandoning travel expense reporting, outsourcing management accounting, reengineering insurance policy issuing, hubbing customer service, turning a telephone call billing system into a product, using an airline reservation system to preempt hotel chains' control of their own product-all of these are ways to extract more value from processes by building on assets, or transforming liability into asset processes. Reengineering, downsizing, and streamlining are among the options on this menu. Treating any one of these as the solution prejudges the problem or opportunity, falls into the one size-and budget-fits all trap.

Accordingly, the menu of value builders developed for the Business Process Investment framework is a list, derived from case examples, of a wide range of options to which you can add on the basis of your own firm's experience and insights. The sequence is from simple (options that involve limited investment, change, effort, and risk) to complex (those at the other extreme). 

• Abandon: Eliminate the process (Shell Europe abandoned travel expense account reporting)
  
  
• Outsource: Move the process to a firm for which it is an identity asset process (Laura Ashley outsourced inventory management and distribution to FedEx)
  
  
• Front-end: Leave the major part of the process and supporting computer transaction processing systems as is, using computer workstations and telecommunications to add flexibility and new services at the front end and gradually erode the back end (Bell Atlantic invested $2.1 billion to front-end its customer ordering systems to provide near-immediate installation of new services)
  
  
• Self-source: Do it yourself or have the customer do it (banks installed ATMs; restaurants set up salad bars; management encouraged employees' use of laptop computers to produce their own presentation graphics and attractively formatted reports)
  
  
• Streamline: Tighten linkages between activities and eliminate waste, steps, delays, costs, and people (Toyota used lean production manufacturing processes to reduce by one-half its space requirements, investment in tools, engineering hours, and on-site inventory)
  
  
• Hub: Bring work and information to a single customer contact point at which a process can be handled in its entirety (Mutual Benefit reduced processing time from around three weeks to two to four hours by having a case manager handle all the steps involved in issuing a new policy)
  
  
• Collaborate: Cultivate a culture and an ethos of cooperation in order to coordinate smooth and effective interactions between interdependent workers (Cemex taught its sales and production staff to work together to remove the barriers of understanding and functional priorities that impeded customer service)
  
  
• Worknet: Provide communications infrastructures that enable individuals, groups, and outside firms to coordinate flexibly and collaboratively, and provide training, incentives, and team support for them to do so (Digital Equipment used networks as the base for worldwide, rapid building of teams for special projects and problem solving)
  
  
• Import: Adopt a process or process infrastructure from another industry (the State of Maryland issued benefits cards that enable holders to withdraw their welfare benefit payments from banking ATMs and to deduct the cost of food from their accounts via credit card payment authorization terminals in supermarkets)
  
  
• Productize: Turn a process into a product that earns money (MCI Communications turned its own customer billing process for long-distance phone calls into a $2-billion-a-year product, "Friends and Family")
  
  
• Franchise: Market a process, with supporting expertise, for someone else to turn into a business (McDonald's provided franchises with complete process capability under the McDonald's organizational brand)
  
  
• Radicalize: Raise the salience of a process in order to accelerate the degree and pace of organizational change, transform it, or do both (Ford instituted its "Quality is Job 1" slogan)
  
  
• Preempt: Use a process infrastructure to capture another industry's traditional business at a customer moment of value (British Airways usurped international hotels' control of distribution of their own product by adding hotel reservations to its airline reservation system)
  
  
• Invent: Create a new process by thinking in new ways and breaking from conceptions of an industry "core" process (Dell Computer substituted catalogs, telephone ordering, customized assembly, and UPS delivery for physical stores and inventory in the retailing of personal computers)