Quality Management Guide

Step 4: Process Assessment

Not every process is of equal importance to your business, so you need to Understand which ones are critical to helping your business improve. Process assessment will help you:

• identify and evaluate current processes
  
• draw up critical success factors for your business
  
• assess the impact of current processes and your ability to meet these critical success factors.

Types of processes

Typically business processes fall into two distinct categories: 'operating processes' and 'management support processes'.

• Operating processes are essentially those processes that actually 'add value' to the product/service. They cover areas like: marketing; sales; customer service; strategy; R&D; and production.
• Management support processes are those processes required to keep the operating processes running as effectively and efficiently as possible. They cover areas like: managing suppliers; people information technologies; internal communications; and financial management.

Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

CSFs are areas of the business that have to perform well for business targets and objectives to be met.

CSFs are normally identified within such areas as production processes, employee and organisational skills, functions, techniques and technologies.

If you don't have a list of CSFs for your business then you should spend some time analysing the relationships between the CSFs and your business processes.

To make your CSFs manageable, best practice is to limit yourself to three CSFs per objective and weight them according to their impact on each objective.