Processes in companies

As soon as it comes to the topic “processes” in companies if have experienced a big misunderstanding in all of the different sections of companies… and so far, I haven’t found a good explanation or description of this topic.

Normally every company should define all types of processes which are relevant for the company, otherwise you will always have the misunderstanding of the word “process”.

Basically it depends on the position or the view from where the “creator” or the “reader” (of this process) is coming from. Most of the companies use the following 3 types of processes:

1.       Operating Processes
2.       Support Processes
3.       Management Processes

But then you also have the Business Processes.

To actually categories your processes within you company, you need to understand the “big picture” of the whole company. So if you compare this to a car manufacturer, the main goal of the company is, building, delivering, selling cars to customers… so, to achieve these goals, the company needs a lot of employees which will execute a huge amount of processes… so in case of a car manufacturer the main business process is obvious…

These employees have a lot of different skills or they are located within different sections or departments of the company… for example you will have employees which will build the cars out of different parts, then you have managers within you companies who will manage these employees. Normally the managers always have a the “big picture” of the company… so they know, what the company is all about… we are building cars, we deliver it to “resellers” and we earn money with this… so this is the main business process of this company… all other processes within this company support or enable this business process… so the above mentioned employee simply executes an operating process, which in the end enables the business process “building/ delivering cars”. On the other hand, you have some employees, which will apply maintenance to the car manufacturing street within the company, so these employees will make sure, that the manufacturing tools of the others employees will work, so this is a typically support process… and last but not least, the companies have managers, which will execute some management processes… management processes will force the managers to for example measure the manufacturing process or measure the quality of each output.

The main problem is, companies do not explain this “big picture” to all of their employees… so sometimes, some employees simply don’t know what the value of their job is, to actually deliver the whole “product”. In my eyes it would create a much better company, if you explain this once to all of you employees… you are not there, so actually “press this button” every 20 minutes… (executing the operating or supporting or management process) you are there because you are a small “gear” within a huge set of “gears” which produces (executing our main business process) a product and earn money with this… In some cases, this would increase the productivity if you simply explain this to your employees. But also in some cases the employees simply don’t care… they will just show up in the office every day and work from 9 until 17 and do the work, sometimes these people don’t care about the big picture, they only want to focus on their small task, and that is enough for them…

The picture below is an example for explaining processes in one company. You have the different Departments which are owner or user of specific Management processes or Operating or Support processes… in most case the processes are executed within different departments. The Main Business Process is the big red process on top of the company… In some companies it is not obvious to the employees, what the Business process ist, in this case you should explain this to you employees, if they don’t want to deal with is, then leave it, but at least “offer” the explanation of the “big picture”.

Well, I always want to understand the “big picture”, but if some employees don’t want to deal with the “big picture” and they are very good in executing their specific tasks (which is in the end a small gear within the whole set of gears), then leave it… as Long as this smal gear is working well, dont force them to understand the “big picture”…