Equip your teams with the tools to make the reduction of waste and non-value-add activities a part of everyone’s job, every day.
Lean, Kaizen and Six Sigma are continuous improvement methodologies that have emerged as a way of increasing work productivity through ever-evolving business processes.
At the heart of concepts like Lean process improvement are the twin tenets of continuous incremental improvement and respect for the people involved. It’s this vital tension that points the way forward for organizations that want to embrace a lean methodology: Lean process management is a culture, not just a program.
Engage the teams
Continuous improvement leverages the engagement of your subject matter experts in process management. By working with those that know your processes best, new and improved procedures and practices can be captured, tested and disseminated throughout the business effectively.
Central to the Lean approach is the identification of waste and opportunities for greater efficiency. By engaging the people directly involved, those pain points can be better located and addressed.
That requires a degree of collaboration, and a good process management platform will facilitate that. Nintex Process Manager invites feedback from the business teams using them, and real-time notifications for process owners ensure the continuous improvement conversation doesn’t falter.
Those discussion threads are stored alongside the processes themselves, so teams can be sure they’ve been heard and changes can be tracked through the evolution of the procedure.
Equip the experts
The constant review and examination of business processes is vital to the lean approach, and the right process platform facilitates identifying the opportunities for improvement where they arise.
Customizable Lean tags in Nintex Process Manager allow users to take their review of processes to the next level.
By applying tags to their processes, users can pinpoint where waste occurs, where delays impact delivery and where manual handling could be addressed. Using a simple ‘#’ within the process content applies the relevant tag at the appropriate activity, allowing users to concentrate on capturing or improving processes while still identifying Lean opportunities.
Empower the executive
When processes have been tagged for Lean considerations, those tags can form the basis of reports for management. Using the tags and affiliated processes, Lean experts can build a picture of the current state of the organization’s processes.
Nintex Process Manager facilitates calculating cycle time, active process time and cost savings across processes, which creates the right context for examination of potential improvements. By updating the process documentation, users can see the relative savings of each iteration in black and white, to support ongoing improvement efforts.
Lean methodologies require a lean culture
Lean methodologies are not just a management tool. They flow through the entire organization and need to become part of business as usual in order to truly be effective.
That requires engagement at every level, and works best when it’s supported by powerful but easy to use business process management software. Spotting opportunities to grow, to reduce waste and to be more productive takes the whole team, and Nintex Process Manager provides them with the tools to embed change into everyday operations for more efficient and effective business processes.
Watch this on-demand demonstration to see how Nintex Process Manager and Automation Cloud seamlessly integrate to deliver end-to-end process planning, mapping, managing, and automation.
