Process Analysis, Improvement and Redesign
Scope
Diagnosing weaknesses and redesigning the process, including the named redesign heuristics.
Core rules
- Qualitative analysis: value-added vs business-value-added vs non-value-added steps; waste categories (waiting, over-processing, defects, motion, inventory, transport, overproduction, unused talent); root cause via 5 whys and Ishikawa; issue register.
- Quantitative analysis: cycle time, waiting time, queueing, simulation, cost and capacity utilisation.
- Redesign heuristics: task elimination, task composition, task automation, parallelisation, knock-out ordering (cheapest disqualifier first), triage (separate simple from complex cases), exception handling, case-based work, resequencing, integration, centralisation vs decentralisation, contact reduction.
- Evaluate every redesign against the Devil's Quadrangle: time, cost, quality, flexibility. Improving one usually taxes another, and the exam expects the trade-off to be stated.
Worked example
A loan process checks identity, income, credit history and collateral in sequence before deciding. Knock-out ordering moves identity first: roughly 30% of applications are rejected there and never reach the expensive collateral check. Specialist capacity frees up and average case effort drops, at the cost of earlier rejection letters. Reasoning: the heuristic removes work on cases destined to fail; measure cycle time, cost per case and correct-rejection rate before declaring success.
Traps that cost marks
Assuming parallel execution always reduces cycle time, when it raises coordination cost and resource load. Using averages only. Selecting a heuristic before diagnosing the issue. Omitting the trade-off in the evaluation.