MIRPUR UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (MUST), MIRPUR

DEPARMENT OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

 Business Process Engineering
SE-353

Lecture 21: Department Improvement Team

Engr. Samiullah Khan & Engr. Fasih Javaid

(Lecturer)

Date:
 Department Improvement Team

• DITs comprise all the members of a particular department or small

work group
• They provide means for all employees to contribute to an ongoing
activity aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of their
department
• The department manager often serves as the team's chairperson
• This activity may be performed by a trained and capable non-
management employee

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 Department Improvement Team

• A DIT identifies problems that cause errors and/or conditions that

decrease the department's effectiveness
• It then develops and implements corrective actions to eliminate these
roadblocks to high productivity and/or error-free performance
• The team:
• Defines problems
• Sets priorities
• Selects improvement targets
• Implements activities that will enable the department to meet or exceed these
goals

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 Selecting PIT Members

• The process owner should determine which departments play key roles
in the process
• Each of these departments should be represented on the PIT
• These representatives will communicate and coordinate activities
between the PIT and the DITs or department managers
• The PIT member will facilitate implementation of the necessary
changes to the department's process

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 Selecting PIT Members
• To ensure that the correct people are assigned to the PIT, the process
owner should meet with the manager of each key department to
discuss the following items:
• The PIT's purpose
• The PIT's objectives
• PIT members' responsibilities
• Key process supplier on whom the manager depends
• To whom the PIT provides process output
• Problems the manager is experiencing with the process
• Improvement suggestions for the process
• The names of department representatives

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 PIT Orientation

• After PIT members have been identified, we need to prepare them for
this important assignment
• Prior to the first meeting, the process owner should send the PIT
members the following:
• The process goals and assumptions
• The process block diagram
• A list of the PIT members' addresses and 'phone numbers
• Copies of the BPI directive
• Copies of the PIT member job description
• The agenda for the first meeting and training session

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 Team Training

• PIT members must be trained to work as a team, understand the

process, collect and analyze data, and improve the process
• As a prerequisite to becoming a PIT member, each individual should
have used basic team and problem-solving tools such as:
• Team process
• Brainstorming
• Graphs
• Histograms (frequency distributions)
• Delphi narrowing technique
• Cause-and-effect diagrams
• Mind mapping techniques

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 BPI’s 10 Fundamental Concepts

• PIT should have some specialized training to prepare its

members for the assigned activities
• This training should include, but not be limited to, the
following:
• BPI concepts
• Flowcharting
• Interviewing techniques
• BPI measurement methods (cost, cycle time, efficiency,
effectiveness, adaptability)

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 BPI’s 10 Fundamental Concepts (Contd…)

• No-value-added activity elimination methods

• Process and paperwork simplification techniques
• Simple language analysis and methods
• Process walk-through methods
• Cost and cycle time analysis

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 Mission Statement
• A good mission statement should:
• Be short (never more than five sentences)
• Define the scope of the activities
• State what will be accomplished
• In some cases, include performance improvement targets and
completion dates
• For example, a mission statement for a design release PIT
might be:
“To understand and apply BPI methods to the total design
release process to make it more effective, efficient, and readily
adaptable to ever-changing business needs. The results will
include reducing the costs to release a new design, reducing the
total cycle time, and improving the manufacturability of the
design”
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 Final Process Boundaries

• The process boundaries will define the following:

• What is included in the process
• What is not included
• What the outputs are from the process
• What the inputs are to the process
• What departments are involved in the process

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 Process Overview
• Who the suppliers of the inputs to the process are
• Who the customers of the outputs of the process are
• What other processes it interacts with
• Typically, inputs or outputs of business processes are information
or services (e.g., data, documents, reports)
• For example, input/outputs for a cash collection process:
• Primary input would be invoicing information
• Secondary inputs would be accounts receivables data, supporting
documents, etc.
• Primary output would be collected invoices
• Secondary outputs would be summary reports, credit notes, etc.

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 Process Customers
• A single process can have as many as five different
types of customers. They are:
1. Primary customers
• They are the customers who directly receive the output
from the process
2. Secondary customers
• He/she is outside the process boundaries that
receives output from the process but is not directly
needed to support the primary mission of the process
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 Process Customers
3. Indirect customers
• Who do not directly receive the output from the process but are
affected if the output from the process is wrong or late
4. External customers
• These are the customers outside the company who receive
the end product or service
• An example of an external customer is a car dealer
5. Consumer
• Sometimes, companies deliver their output directly to the
consumer
• In these cases, the external customer and the consumer are the
same person

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THANKS