Improving business processes: Does anybody have an idea? Rob - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Improving business processes: Does anybody have an idea?

Rob Vanwersch, Irene Vanderfeesten, Eric Rietzschel and Hajo Reijers

Problem statement

Months are spent on discovering / analyzing an AS-IS process systematically A few hours are spent

• n generating

improvement ideas intuitively (TO-BE)

Typical current practice

Does anybody have an idea? Does anybody have an idea?

Problems of traditional brainstorming

No safeguard for a systematic / comprehensive exploration of potential solution space Practitioners rely on personal experience and intuition (1) Biased choices (2) Attractive ideas are missed Full redesign potential is not realized

Aren’t there any alternatives for traditional brainstorming?

Yes, there are:

• BPR best practices
• TRIZ innovation principles
• MIT Process Handbook
• Etc.

But what do we know about these alternatives?

That these alternatives seem to perform well in case- studies.

How to continue?

Shouldn’t we be more interested in whether these alternatives outperform existing techniques (i.e. traditional brainstorming)? It’s time for a first controlled experiment in this area!

Our lab experiment

VS RePro Traditional brainstorming BPR TRIZ RePro

The RePro technique

Specific problem General problem Specific solution General solution General rules

• f thumb

The RePro technique

• 1. Self-service: ‘Move tasks towards the customers’

By moving checks and other operations that are part of a business process to the customer, cost can be reduced and customer satisfaction might increase. A disadvantage of this solution is a higher probability of fraud. Example: Ask the patient, instead of the nurse, to pick up the drugs by the hospital pharmacy.

Service concept Main process design Detailed process design Customers External environment Tasks Task order and timing Human resources Facilities / equipement / material Information ICT Physical lay-out Examples:

• Self-service
• Outsourcing

Examples:

• Task elimination
• Prior action

Examples:

• Parallelism
• Case manager

Set-up lab experiment

VS RePro Traditional brainstorming BPR TRIZ RePro

99 students Industrial Engineering

Experiment participants

Experiment factor and factor levels

1C (44) 1M (45) Control (TB) Manipulation (RePro) Individuals

Experiment task

Generating process improvement ideas for “real-life” cataract surgery process.

• Plenary video message
• Case description including:
• Improvement objectives
• Process models and descriptions
• Process and waiting times
• Cost information
• Problems identified by employees

and patients

• Technique description (RePro / brainstorming)
• Digital post-experiment questionnaire

Experiment information-set

• Productivity: number of unique ideas generated
• Satisfaction with the technique (Likert 1-7)
• Intention-to-use the technique (2-item Moody (2003);

Likert 1-7)

Experiment response variables

H1: The RePro technique supports individuals in generating more ideas as compared to traditional brainstorming.

• More complete exploration of the solution space
• Less cognitive effort to start new train of thought
• Conformance to technique examples is limited

Experiment hypotheses

H2: Individuals using the RePro technique are more satisfied with their technique than individuals using traditional brainstorming. H3: Individuals using the RePro technique have a positive intention-to-use the technique.

Experiment hypotheses

And the results are....

Average number of unique ideas: TB: 14,57 (N=37) RePro: 17,82 (N=44) No support for H1

H1: Productivity

Follow-up analysis: Productivity

Two different styles of using the RePro technique: (1) Opportunity-centric:

List of RePro principles (starting point) Case-description

Follow-up analysis: Productivity

Two different styles of using the RePro technique: (2) Problem-centric:

Problem areas as identifiable in case-description (starting point) List of RePro principles

Average number of unique ideas: TB: 14,57 (N=37) RePro_Problem-centric: 14,90 (N=31) RePro_Opportunity-centric: 24,70 (N=13)

Follow-up analysis: Productivity

Average satisfaction with technique (Likert 1-7): TB : 4,70 (N=37) RePro: 5,30 (N=44) Support for H2

H2: Satisfaction with technique

Condition N Intention-to-use > 4 Intention-to-use = 4 Intention-to-use < 4 Intention-to-use Average RePro 44 36 (82%) 2 (4%) 6 (14%) 5,1

H3: Intention-to-use technique

Intention-to-use technique (Likert 1-7) Support for H3

Conclusions

• Experiment results confirm potential for using a more

advanced technique for generating process improvement ideas.

• But experiment results also strongly relate the usage

style of such a technique to its performance.

• Further experiments are recommended to investigate

effects of different usage styles in controlled setting.

Thanks for your attention!

Thanks for

Questions / remarks: r.j.b.vanwersch@tue.nl More information: https://robvanwersch.wordpress.com/