Process Management 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 provides on-demand automation of all areas of Performance Management, including Process Management approaches, as well as related Performance Improvement methodologies, including statistical process control (SPC) charts, process flow diagrams, DMAIC and DMADV improvement projects, Six Sigma Storyboards, Six Sigma Top-Level Indicator Dashboards, and more.

Process Management

Process Management ensures that a business process is owned, defined, understood, measured, and operated consistently in such a way that it meets the needs of all customers of the process every time.

Good Process Management involves:

• Detailed documentation of the processes
• Ownership and management of the processes
• Identifying, owning, and managing the leading measures found within the processes
• Conducting improvement initiatives to address gaps in performance

ASE enables better integration of Process Management, such as strategic planning and Balanced Scorecard deployment. This integration results in increased alignment between strategy and business processes, better identification of leading metrics (which ties improvement efforts to true root causes), improved ability to close performance gaps in the most important strategic areas, more systematic alignment between strategic goals and employees’ roles and actions, and a quicker path to results.

ASE software includes a Process Management module, which helps organizations achieve this important integration by tying together strategic planning, Performance Management, and Process Management.

ASE's Process Detail page works as a command center for a Process by allowing users to drill through performance results and see details such as: child/parent processes, process owners, and performance graphs displaying trends of leading measures. Other linked objects may also be displayed, such as associated initiatives/projects, strategic objectives, and Scorecards. Users also have the ability to add process workflow diagrams, external links, user-defined charts, action items, comments, and action items to the process.

ASE provides a single, accessible place to view and manage everything that needs to be formulated and executed together to meet customer needs in a consistent, high-quality manner.

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.

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).

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 Process Management.

Do you have existing content that you want to automate quickly?

• Learn about our ActiveStart™ Packages that enable rapid implementation.