Articles

When organizations become fragmented, it requires more work to deliver value to the customer and the ability of the organization to adapt to environmental changes is diminished.  In extreme cases, the loss of value is deadly and businesses go extinct.

What causes businesses to become fragmented?

Business fragmentation occurs when critical processes aren’t managed as an integrated system.  Workflows become a complex series of handoffs between functions, jobs and information systems.  Each handoff represents an opportunity to introduce error, delay and added cost.

When organizations become fragmented, it requires more work to deliver value to the customer and the ability of the organization to adapt to environmental changes is diminished.  In extreme cases, the loss of value is deadly and businesses go extinct.

What causes businesses to become fragmented?

When launching a process improvement effort, your foundational step is understanding how your business currently works and how it needs to change. I call this “process baselining”. It gives you the baseline or starting point upon which your process improvement efforts can be built.  Baselining involves:

documenting the process steps along with their supporting information (i.e., roles, timing, volumes, metrics, etc.), understanding the places where the process breaks down (breakpoints), identifying areas of waste (i.e., redundancies, delays, etc.). 

What’s at stake.

As companies move towards a process centric organizational model, the standardization of their business process maps becomes an increasingly important issue. The maps need to have the same general format, use the same set of symbols and be able to be read the same way.

Andrew Spanyi is the managing director of Spanyi International Inc., a consulting and training company that operates in the field of organization and process design. He has worked with executive teams at global organizations for nearly two decades, assisting them in transforming the way they think about their business. He is the author of "Business Process Management is a Team Sport, Play It to Win!"