Business Processes

Many organizations are engaged in lean initiatives, where value stream mapping is incorporated to help identify and remove the seven wastes of lean. Most organizations have considerable difficulty in translating these lean principles to asset management. What about the business processes or workflows as they relate to reliability? Do you have business processes or workflows and that clearly indentify how people work in your organization? If you don't have these formal workflows, how do you clearly identify what is expected of your people? How do you audit for adherence and continuous improvement?

These business processes or workflows are critical when implementing a new Computerized Maintenance Management System or Enterprise Asset Management System (CMMS/ EAM). The main purpose of implementing a CMMS or EAM is to automate business processes or workflows. You need business processes or workflows for work management, operations checklists and standard operating procedures, materials management, and so on.

This important element enables an organization to establish and document their "Best Practices" for all roles to follow. Once these business processes or workflows are established step descriptions and desired outcomes can be identified and specific responsibilities and accountabilities can be assigned to ensure adherence and utilization of each defined business processes or workflow.

No organization can afford to have multiple ways of doing day to day business so you must define, document, share, educate, and audit all business processes or workflows routinely.

People and Processes provides education and resourcing to help you develop these business processes or workflows so that everyone in the organization can follow one method for any given set of tasks. These are integrated into your day-to-day work habits, policies and procedures manual, and new employee training guides.