Who doesn’t want to increase productivity, cut costs, work safer and operate in a more environmentally-friendly way? Tracey Evans reports on how thought leadership processes can access all areas of a business to improve sustainability.
Some brave management decisions will produce short-term gains but a more strategic approach is needed for sustainable success. The only problem is that between the desire and the reality is a plethora of business improvement systems designed to confound. There are shortcomings inherent in most systems, says Robert Pojasek, a Principal Consultant with SAI Global. In 35 years of consulting on process improvement, Pojasek has seen countless business fads try and fail while he has doggedly pursued his own theories, successfully putting them into practice in hundreds of corporations around the world.
Pojasek hasn’t used a fancy name for his approach and he doesn’t use another language to describe its principles. In fact one of the quality management tools it includes was developed in the 19th Century. Underwriting the success of his Systems Approach to Process Improvement are two apparently simple ideas that are not often applied in other process improvement tasks. The first is a focus on the organization’s core product or service realization processes, separate from any business
processes (the activities of people). The second is to invite all employees (as well as suppliers and customers where appropriate) to participate in the planning and implementation of the process improvement exercise.
Combined, these ideas contribute to a ‘management by fact’, a way of providing sound data about the way that business inputs and outputs are accomplished without the results being clouded by opinion and lack of knowledge. This then provides a foundation for broader business improvement systems.
> Map it
The essential first step in the Systems Approach is a turbo-charged mapping method he calls ‘hierarchical process mapping’. Importantly it shows the connections between core processes and supporting tasks and, through a database, provides links to process documentation, allowing ready access to all information such as standard operating procedures.
Beginning with a mission statement, the core processes – those that directly describe the organization’s mission statement – are drawn in boxes with arrows indicating the direction of the processes. A maximum of six work steps are allowed for each core process, to help illustrate
the production in its simplest form and to provide ease of reading on a page. From each of these boxes a maximum two levels of more detailed work steps may be drawn in a hierarchical fashion (see box: Hierarchical process map). The difference between this and other methods of process mapping is how the core process is supported by a myriad of essential supporting processes as well as all of the business processes. Any business activities that support the core processes are shown as sub levels on the process map. This provides a process view and systems approach, showing the links between each work step, says Pojasek.
“It’s elementary but very true that everything is connected to everything else,” he says. “So, every time you solve a problem in a facility, you may well be creating a problem for someone else either downstream or upstream, because everything is linked.”
An environmental problem in a refinery was solved using this principle, says Pojasek. Every time a particular membrane filter was changed, diesel fuel escaped into the waste water treatment plant. Since the plant wasn’t designed to handle diesel, it caused an environment problem and the refinery was fined a number of times.”
The engineers wondered whether they could change the filter, mount it differently, or change the filter more quickly to prevent the diesel escaping. “Finally, one of the engineers, who’d been trained in the mapping method asked why the filter was necessary,” says Pojasek. “It turns out they were using steam to clean some sulphur out of the fuel and that introduced water into the fuel, which the filter was designed to remove.” The engineer discovered there was another way to remove sulphur, using hydrogen. That eliminated the need for the filter and the steam, saving significant costs.
“So what they did was remove a cause, they didn’t put water in the fuel anymore so they didn’t need the filter,” says Pojasek. “Surprisingly, if you’re not looking upstream you’re not going to find a solution upstream. The reason why the process mapping method is hierarchical is because of that notion that everything is connected to everything else. It allows you look upstream, downstream, and at the supporting processes.”
The amendments to IS0 9000 six years ago (now ISO 9000:2000) were significant in recognising the importance of core processes over supporting business activities. “Before it was changed, the quality management system required you to look at 20 different processes, 19 of which were management processes and only one was production based. But a company can’t exist without the production process – it’s really very foolhardy to think you can run a company just on good management alone,” says Pojasek.
While departments such as maintenance, accounts and HR all have their own processes, Pojasek’s map shows how they link into the main process – the product and service realization – as support activities.
> Not what you know, but who you ask
With his process map in hand, Pojasek likes to walk through a plant, checking that the processes on paper match those in reality and looking for input from employees. “They usually start laughing when they see it and say, ‘This is really great, but we haven’t done it this way in 10 years’. Then they start drawing on the map to show you how it should be.”
It works, says Pojasek, because the map is inanimate. “It has no personality or opinions; it’s not trying to prove anything. When I’m talking to management and to employees, we’re both looking at the piece of paper and we both want it to be correct,” he says.
“I’m a big believer in bottom-up systems. Everything you need to know about how to run your company better is already there in your employee’s heads, you just need to find a way to learn what they already know.” Pojasek says every time an employee suggests a process improvement, he asks them how long they’ve known about it. “My unofficial average is seven years. They say they’ve never told anybody because no one ever asked.”
Equally, suppliers and customers have valuable feedback and advice to help prepare an accurate map. “For example, a supplier may be able to tell you a more efficient way to use their product. They always have a general wisdom for you but you’ve never bothered to ask them,” says Pojasek. Customers, too, can help you become more cost-effective and efficient, he says. “I’m working with a company right now that makes and sells their product in plastic bottles. They sell 12 dozen bottles to a particular customer who commented about the excessive packaging used to ship the product. So we’re now using a lot less packing material and the customers are thanking us.”
> Exploiting the systems
Pojasek says that the process maps provide a structured way to find the problems in the process. The other tools in the Systems Approach enable employee teams to prepare “draft” action plans for management approval before they are implemented.
He has used the Systems Approach with other process improvement programs such as Six Sigma and LEAN “and it’s excellent, because of that employee buy-in”, he says. “Too often the employees are told what to do instead of involving them in a
meaningful way in the project planning.”
But to go a step further, Pojasek believes the Systems Approach can also facilitate the integration of the three approaches to business improvement: management systems; process improvement; and business excellence. He is presently working with his colleagues at SAI Global to make this happen.
> Room for improvement
Considering the very essence of environment science is quality management, Robert Pojasek’s career path makes a lot of sense. After starting out as a chemist, he moved into environment management and is a pioneer in pollution prevention and “cleaner
production” techniques. His decades of work in this field have been recognized this year with two awards, one from the Canadian Pollution Prevention Roundtable and another from the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable in the United States. He has also received the APEX Writing Excellence award this year for his book, Making the Business Case for EHS.
In 1987, Pojasek began publishing the collection of quality management tools he had been using successfully as the Systems Approach to Process Improvement. “I went through about 400 of the hundreds and hundreds of tools that go back to the 1800s to try to find a better way of doing process improvement and I selected the most visual and interactive,” he says. “The youngest tool I use was published in 1943 (a cause and effect diagram) and the oldest one is the Pareto Analysis that goes back to 1897.”
Today, Pojasek is an internationally recognized process improvement specialist with 35 years of consulting experience in the manufacturing and service sectors as well as government facilities. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in process improvement, critical thinking and sustainable development.