Business Transformation Will Make Your Business More Agile
Business transformation is an initiative that aligns the people
, process and technology aspects of a company more closely with its business strategy.
It should be considered a continuous process and seen as essential to any company that wants to improve their business activities. Known as business agility, flexible business strategy which adapts and reacts to the evolving economic environment.
The two most common types of business transformation are known as lean and six sigma.
Lean manufacturing or production was developed by Toyota. It's the production practice that views expenditure on resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer as wasteful and seeks to eradicate it. The crux of lean manufacturing is to preserve the value of the product or service, but reducing the amount of waste when doing so. It's the age-old idea of increasing efficiency by reducing waste.
Lean manufacturing has four key goals: improve quality; reduce waste; reduce the time taken to complete business activities and reduce total costs.
Six Sigma was developed by Motorola. This method of business transformation focuses on improving the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the cause of errors and minimising the variability in manufacturing and business processes. The name comes from the six sigma rating in the manufacturing industry; a six sigma process is one with 99.99% of products are produced without errors.
The Six Sigma process needs to be handled by a few key roles in order to be implemented successfully. Starting at the bottom, 'Yellow Belts' are trained in the basic application of management tools. 'Green Belts' take up the Six Sigma process alongside other job responsibilities. The 'Black Belts' apply the methodology to certain projects and devote their time to Six Sigma. The 'Master Black Belts' act as in-house coaches and spend their time ensuring the process is carried throughout the organisation.
There are of course numerous other methods of business transformation, but the one thing that connects all these methods is the impact they can have on your business: it helps your business become more agile which, alongside helping your business to survive, will help it grow too.