To sustain operational excellence, it must become part of the organisation’s DNA, become part of the regular routine for creating and delivering value to customers.
And the secret sauce is process discipline. Process audits are excellent for verifying and reinforcing what has already been implemented. The objectives and scope of these process audits should include the following:
- To ensure that processes are well designed and capable, the audit needs to evaluate process capability in meeting performance targets and specifications.
- Audit for employee compliance to established procedures.
- Verify that employee skills and training are current and employees are capable of performing their work.
- Audit control plans and verify that employees have the means of knowing what’s important in their key job roles within the process of value stream. Know what to do in the process. Know when to intervene and what actions to take.
- Verify that employees in key roles have the necessary process authority, responsibility, and accountability.
- Audit to ensure that managers and process owners have access, either directly or indirectly, to resources, tools, and techniques for design, improvement, and control.
- Verify that every project is indeed necessary. Audit linkage of projects to accomplishing the organization’s annual goals and strategic priorities. Verify that projects have the support from management and have sufficient allocation of time and resources to these projects regardless of whether they are Kaizen events, DMAIC, DMADV projects, or value stream management.
- Audit for results and improvements from projects and validate that they were sustained. Review statistical process control charts for evidence.
- Audit to verify that value stream managers and process owners have the authority and the means to manage, control, and improve the entire value stream or the end-to-end process.
- Verify that process metrics and KPIs are supportive of CTQs, or critical-to-quality requirements.
- Audit performance metrics and rewards to verify that they are aligned to the organization’s annual goals and strategic priorities.
- Verify that KPIs, or key performance indicators, are indeed key and are limited to the vital few.
- Verify enterprise-wide alignment of strategies, priorities, policies, and decisions.
- Verify alignment across different functions that support value streams or end-to-end processes.
- Verify alignment up and down different levels of the organization. For example, alignment between the individual level, team, department, location to division and company level.
These audits can be done in a staggered way throughout the year, at least once a year for each area, department, or process. The frequency for any one location or process can be increased if there are noncompliance or performance issues. You want to get to the point when everyone is willing and able to do well to be operationally excellent everyday. In other words, the entire enterprise can deliver value better, faster, cheaper.