International Process and Performance Institute

Process Efficiency

Process efficiency is the measure of a process's ability to be performed without activities that are non value-add or unintentional.

Process efficiency - The ratio of value-added work to non value-added work plus unintentional work created by a process.

A process that is completely efficient (100% efficiency) creates no unintentional work, nor does it have any non value-added work within it.

Every process represents a certain amount of work performed by people, machines and sometimes systems. When determining the efficiency of a process, we need to identify the causes of work in a process and then try to place those causes into perspective in respect to value-add, non value-add and unintentional work (which is always non value-add).

Process Quality

There are three measures of process quality.

Statistical Process Quality is a measure of the likelihood that the process will deviate from the intended “process flow” in such a way that the consumer of the process outcome will not get what they expect – at least not in the way (what, where, when, how) they expected it. In a perfect process (Quality of 100%) no deviations would ever occur.

SPQ is a direct measure of process quality. The higher the percentage, the higher the quality of the process.

Obviously what we are looking for in process quality is the ability of a process to produce its intended outcome exactly as it is intended, including the underlying process it went through to get there. In a perfected process, there would be no deviation - ever.

The Points of Failure factor is the second quality measure we can use to assess process quality. It applies to customer-facing processes and processes where we have identified the internal consumer (customer) of the process outcome.

The POF factor is a key measure of customer satisfaction, assessing the impact of Moments of Truth and their exponential affect on the customer of the process (each “process deviation” experienced at a Moment of Truth exponentially increases the process customer’s dissatisfaction level). Obviously when contrasting Current State versus Future State we should see a decrease in the POF factor in the Future State if we are expecting the quality of the process to be improved.

The POF factor is a relative process quality measure. The lower the value, the higher the quality of the process.

Finally, there is the issue of Fitness of Use – the quality definition made so famous by Dr. Juran in the 1940’s. Juran defined quality as “Fitness of Use as determined by the User”. This brings into question our intended outcome of the process (and there better be an intended outcome that is clearly articulated or things are in a real mess).

The question of Fitness of Use can only be answered by the User, or at least by developing the perspective of the user from their Point of View (for customers of the business this is termed the “Outside-in” perspective).

So the third process quality measure deals with how well the process is aligned to its “customer.” That requires a clearly articulated Intended Outcome that can be tested against what the customer (User) desires from the process, within their personal context and even in respect to any higher-level process they are actually engaged in.

This is a highly subjective quality assessment although in many ways it is the most important assessment we have on process quality.

How often do we know these impacts when we take on business process management and improvement initiatives? Very rarely to be frank and honest. Far too often we fail in our role as process stewards, to hold ourselves accountable to the fundamentals of process improvement. It's a choice that we don't often realize we have or that we are making by our very actions.

The choice is whether or not we are going to be true professional professionals. What choice have you made?