Process Optimization
Features Includes:
Business process innovation
Standardization and automation
Business structuring and re-engineering
Business incubation and expansion planning
Benefits
Process design & redesign documentation
Process performance monitoring and optimization
Re-engineering / Institutionalization
Process automation
Business integration
Business Process Innovation
Process innovations increase bottom-line profitability, reduce costs, improve efficiency, improve productivity, and increase employee job satisfaction. They also deliver enhanced product or service value to the customer.
Process innovations focus on building an adaptive business process management system (BPMS). For manufacturing companies, process innovation include such things as integrating new production methods and technologies that lead to improved efficiency, quality, or time-to-market, and services that are sold with those products. For service companies, process innovations enable them to introduce "front office" customer service improvements and add new services.
Standardization and Automation
Many companies are in the process of establishing standards for master station, remote station,
and field level automation. Some companies are well down the standardization path and others
are just now beginning. Standardization is expected to achieve measurable economic benefits,
usually in the form of reduced automation costs. However, few standardization efforts actually
achieve anything for several reasons.
One typical approach to standardization is to limit the choice of hardware and software to
specific brands, that is, to standardize on a specific brand of PLC or system. The
intended benefit is to be able to negotiate better prices with vendors and limit the number of
technologies that the staff has to learn. In practice, companies often end up paying more
because they have relieved their vendors of any competitive incentive. They also tend to
standardize on the lowest common denominator in order to ensure that all their needs can be
served by a single kind of technology. Unfortunately, that policy could leave companies at a
competitive disadvantage if their vendor is slow to adopt the latest technologies.
Business structuring and re-engineering
Business structuring and re-engineering is a management approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating effciency
and effectiveness of the process that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations
to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business.
Business process reengineering is also known as BPR, Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation, or Business Process Change Management.
Business incubation and expansion planning
Business incubators, evolving from experiences with business centers and other support services,
have grown rapidly in number from about 200 a decade ago to over 3,000 world-wide today.
Incubator programs in the developing and restructuring countries are typically focused on
technology ventures. But the interests of civil society call for the government, private sector and
universities in all nations to address the wider concerns of empowering disadvantaged groups
through employment and facilitated access to capital (human, knowledge, social and financial).
While incubators have grown in numbers, the uneven performance and poor sustainability in many
situations have become serious issues with the governments and sponsors who continue to subsidize
many of them. There has been much recent interest in identifying ‘best practices’ that could then be
used elsewhere. But these practices are location-, culture- and time-specific, and can only be adapted
to the conditions prevailing in local situations. Success in the Olympiad of venture creation and employment
generation depends essentially on five inter-linked rings: Public policy, private partnerships,
knowledge affiliations, professional networking and community involvement.