Rarely, when crafting a process flow diagram, can a business process be easily defined as a series of linear activities.  Oftentimes, the answer to the question ‘what happens next?’ is… it depends.  Was there an inspection failure?  Is there a system outage?  Did the vendor deliver the necessary

Capacity planners would like for resources to be utilized 100% of the time and for customers to never experience a wait.  These goals, however, naturally contend with each another. 

Identifying the resources required to complete a process or project can be relatively straightforward.  Determining how to allocate resources across multiple processes and projects can be quite difficult; particularly when the time to complete tasks is highly variable and there is little historic

Often, in both business and manufacturing processes, there are resources that are shared by multiple product and service lines.  Determining the overall utilization of these shared resources can be difficult, particularly when the demand for the products and services that need these resources var

For years, Discrete Event Simulation (DES) has been the power tool for analyzing and understanding business processes.  However, DES is extremely laborious and data intensive.  Usually, businesses only have data on process performance and not on the activities that make up the processes.  Often,

Whether planning a new business process or managing the performance of an existing one, it is important to distinguish between the direct costs and overhead cost components.  While historical data can be queried to understand the actual costs incurred for existing business processes, it is paramo

Swim lane (cross functional) diagrams provide a mechanism to easily indicate the department, function, or party responsible for the activities that make up a business process.  As there is often a delay associated with handoffs between lanes, these provide a valuable tool to identify where potent

When holding process improvement workshops that include a process or value stream mapping exercise, many Lean traditionalists prefer to use butcher paper and post-it notes to capture process activities and information flow.  The reasoning, most often, is that this method is easier and can be an i

Swim lane (cross functional) diagrams are an excellent tool to capture the process flow and simultaneously indicate the department, function, or party responsible for each activity in the process. 

There are many important elements when it comes to the formation of an effective process improvement team.  The identification of ownership, the selection of interdisciplinary, multi-skilled team members, project selection, and the establishment of clear objectives should all be carefully underta