Question: Why does anyone attempt Business Process Improvement?

Answer: To improve the ‘Return on Capital Employed'.

What is a ‘process’?

Although a business process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular business and it often can be visualised with a flowchart as a sequence of activities. Our experience is that most managers find this question quite difficult to answer in any great detail.

Why is this?

• A Transactional Process does not exist in its own right (anymore than a business does). One cannot go to the shelf and take off ‘a Transactional Process’ (luckily, however, one can make a diagrammatic representation of a process). A Transactional Process is simply a collection of habits, both people’s and machine’s. A Transactional Process is invariably not a single ‘process’; its is a collection of ‘pathways’ along which the work will flow until the end point is reached.


• The impact of this insight is that to improve the Transactional Process you have to understand and influence individual pathways, thereby changing the collection of habits. Sounds simple? Actually, that’s exactly right; it is simple (and therefore fast) when you understand processes.

Click here to read more about our approach to Business Process Improvement and how we can assist your business.