Performance Improvement with ActiveStrategy Enterprise

ActiveStrategy Enterprise® (ASE) is the most comprehensive Performance Management software available today, supporting all areas of Performance Management within one enterprise application – from strategic planning and prioritization, to scorecard and metric deployment, initiative and task management, Performance Improvement, and even Personal Goal Management to align individual employees.

ASE is flexible enough to provides support for a range of Performance Improvement methodologies including Six Sigma, Lean, PDCA and other types of projects and initiatives.

About Performance Improvement

The key to achieving improved results is effectively applying resources to the right areas. This requires knowledge of the fundamentals of structured problem solving, as well as a framework for ensuring improvement efforts are well-targeted, successfully executed, and easily tracked.

However, most organizations either fail to manage initiatives/projects well or they manage them in a totally separate system from the one they use to manage strategy and performance metrics. Both of these scenarios limit Performance Improvement gains.

How ASE Supports Performance Improvement

ASE software allows organizations to manage initiatives, projects, and program groups in a much more strategic, connected way, by aligning the initiatives and tasks directly to the performance gaps they are designed to address. ASE lets you link initiatives to strategic objectives and measures and view them all on a single screen, allowing decision makers to clearly see the impact an initiative is (or is not) having on a specific gap.

High-level initiative summaries can be displayed directly on a scorecard or dashboard, showing the alignment of objectives, measures, and initiatives all in one place, reducing the time required to make important decisions. One click on the initiative name will take a user into a more detailed view of the initiative, displaying owner names, tasks, budget, timing, scope, and even in-house attached documents, such as initiative charters or other supporting materials.

ASE software also allows users to track and manage groupings of initiatives or projects as program groups and portfolios at multiple levels ensuring that leaders have an easy way to view activities grouped in a logical and effective way. This allows great flexibility for managing complex and even multi-year improvement efforts.

Program groups and portfolios may be viewed in several different ways depending on the amount of detail required. For a quick visual overview, users may select a Gantt chart, which displays red/yellow/green bars based on the status of each project within the grouping.

Automated Email Alerts

ASE allows decision makers to "subscribe" to initiatives/projects, tasks, and action items to stay informed about status changes, progress, and potential challenges. The software ensures that project and initiative information stays up to date by sending out automated email alerts to remind owners when milestone tasks require an update or status reports are due.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a quality improvement and management approach used to identify and remove the causes of defects, errors, and variation within processes. The data-driven methodology can be applied to a range of industries – from manufacturing to service industries – and to many types of business, manufacturing, and transactional processes.

Six Sigma typically involves two fundamental approaches:

• Implementing a measurement-based strategy that focuses on process improvement and variation reduction.
• Executing Six Sigma improvement projects (utilizing DMAIC and DMADV methods) to achieve Six Sigma quality levels.

How ASE Supports Six Sigma

ActiveStrategy Enterprise supports both of these approaches. The software's Six Sigma Dashboards provide a comprehensive, interactive view of an organization’s top-level indicators (displaying hierarchies of causal measures in comparable chart formats). This provides Six Sigma organizations with a strategic "line-of-sight" view of their measurement system, while also allowing users to drill down into the drivers – and ultimately root causes – of defects or variation. ASE supports control charts, trend charts, and other sophisticated Performance Measurement options, allowing users to monitor processes and determine when any are out of control.

In addition to providing both strategic and drill-down views, ASE helps organizations enact, monitor, and report on Six Sigma-based improvement activities. These improvement initiatives can be linked to high-level TLIs, programs/portfolios, and Six Sigma Dashboards in the software, ensuring that improvement efforts are aligned to the Six Sigma strategy. ASE provides DMAIC- and DMADV-based project templates, and supports action items, process map attachments, email alerts for owners, and more – all designed to help an organization achieve its quality goals.

Lean and Lean Sigma

Lean (originally called the Toyota Production System) is a quality improvement and management approach that focuses on removing waste and reducing cycle times for a process or system. The driving principle of Lean is to produce the right product or service at the right time in the right quantity for the customer (producing exactly what they need and nothing more).

How ActiveStrategy Enterprise supports Lean and Lean Sigma

ActiveStrategy Enterprise supports Lean and Lean Sigma principles by:

• Providing visibility into ongoing Lean improvement projects – via high-level portfolios of all ongoing Lean projects, as well as initiative and task management capabilities for individual projects.
• Tracking improvement goals (such as total number of non-value added hours removed from a process) to ensure Lean efforts are effective.
• Linking Lean improvement projects directly to the leading measures they are designed to improve (so measure owners and decision makers can see if improvements are having the desired impact).
• Providing a convenient, accessible repository for value stream maps. Value stream maps may also include clickable measures with stoplight indicators, allowing process owners and business leaders to monitor processes and improvements.

Contact us to schedule a demo and see how ActiveStrategy Enterprise software supports and enables Performance Improvement.

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