Where does your business data flow to? Does it get shared, linked and used around your business? Or, does it get produced and nothing happens to it?

Have you ever played the yellow car game*? If you haven't, you might be wondering how many yellow cars there are on the roads. But, if you have you might be like me, staggered at how many yellow cars there are! Process improvement is similar.

When you implement (or update) a new business process it is vital that you understand how to manage it. It is one thing to use the metrics in your business to keep an eye on it, but sometimes you need to ask questions to make sure it is working the way that you want it to.

A strategy that many people use, when trying to develop ideas to improve their business, is using building blocks. By this I mean that they break down how their business works into smaller, easy to understand, chunks. Let me give you an example:

Many businesses measure their on time delivery performance by counting how many orders leave their business on the same date / time as agreed with their customer. That makes sense, and is how most businesses do it, shown in the diagram below: There is another way, a way that can help you to pin point where and when things aren't working properly. By measuring the start of the process you increase the chance of the process delivering on time (as in, you rarely catch up when you start late!). It's a small change in perspective when it comes to measuring on time delivery, but it gives you a chance to correct things before it is too late. Of course you can still measure the output, but by placing your focus on the start of the process you not only increase your chances of delivering on time but start the conversation around what needs to happen in order to launch your processes properly. The final results won't turn up by magic, but they can appear with

A team member at one of my clients was quizzing me the other day, he was struggling to share his vision of an improvement with the rest of his team. He needed them to get onboard, so that they could help in any way they could, but was struggling with how to arrange his thoughts. I gave him the following structure, and I thought that I would share it with you too via this blog.

What happens when you identify a continuous improvement opportunity for your business? Does it happen instantly, or does it need a little prodding?