ALC's LEAN Articles Series

DRIVING EFFICIENCY IN BUSINESS

APPLIED LEAN CONSULTING

Measuring Process Efficiency and Effectiveness

Measuring Process Efficiency & Effectiveness

When we map processes with clients, we identify in Manufacturing businesses the “First Time Quality” or the percentage of times we can move on to the next process step without going back to a previous step for re-work.

In the same way, when mapping an Admin process (for example a Sales process or Service process), we identify FTQ deficiencies as turnbacks: incomplete or delayed information requiring us to go back a step to check or amend.

In both Manufacturing and Admin, these deficits impact the rate and quality of our overall process – it’s effectiveness and efficiency. In the same way as water flows down a hill in the most direct route, every FTQ deficiency or turnback is a diversion, an eddy if you like, that adds delay (or adds to space requirements), requires additional work and detracts from process performance.

Our work identifies these barriers, reworks the processes to alleviate the pinch points, reduces delays, eliminates double work and synchronises process steps. But are we helping Efficiency or Effectiveness?

Often the terms are used interchangeably but the dictionary definitions are:

Efficient: The ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system.
Effective: Producing the intended or expected result.

At ALC we think that Efficiency is for things and processes, whilst Effectiveness relates to people.

So, whilst we de-bug processes to make them more efficient and tuned to the needs of the business, the implementation of the future state is about people effectiveness: people working standard processes to standard times to deliver great performance.

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Contact us at ALC to find out how to tune your business to your customer needs and drive the productivity of your teams.