Interaction Process Analysis and
Process Improvement

How many times have you sat in a meeting where the team discussed serious business process improvements? How many times have those meetings lacked any real substance? Improving a process cannot be done on a whim, it needs to be done with facts and figures; information drives good process improvement. Interaction Process Analysis helps provide the required information.

One company that I used to work for, constantly changed their business processes. Something wasn't working, so it got changed. A few weeks later the same issue would arise and the company instigated another change. The cycle repeated. Each ill-informed change took time and effort. But the change did not truly address the challenges faced by the business.

The company didn't make the small investment in effort to gather the information required to make an informed decision. Yet the company tolerated the countless inefficiencies down the line. Thankfully I was eventually able to get involved with this process and lead by example; basing decisions on data, information and insight.

Interaction Process Analysis

One of the most effective process improvement methods is the 'Interaction Process Analysis" tool

This is a veteran of the process improvement world, but a tool that seems to be largely ignored outside of the process improvement community. This tool looks at the process and the interaction of the elements about the process.

The core elements of the analysis include:

• Recording each step of the process.
• Capturing the associated distances traveled and time taken.
• Determining the type of activity being recorded (operation, travel, delay, inspection or storage).

The art of a good interaction process analysis exercise involves capturing every single step in a process.

To put this into its proper perspective, one business' member of staff stated "I get the order out of my email, print it out and put it in my colleagues in-tray. He then takes it and processes it. Thirty seconds. That's it. I don't know why we need to do this analysis!"

After some clarification the real picture was:

1. Process emails for order: 1 minute.
2. Collects printed order from printer and leaves in colleagues in tray: 2 minutes.
3. Delay waiting for colleague to process previous day's orders: 4.5 hours.

Yes, you read that right. Initially the staff member perceived that this part of the process took around 30 seconds. However, in reality, if you follow the order, the process took over four and half hours.

Interaction Process Analysis helps you

• examine the process thoroughly
• document and describe the detail level
• find opportunities waiting for you in your business.