The FIT Business Process Analysis And Benchmarking

Everyone is driving toward increased efficiency and profitability. One hears of initiatives to benchmark against other industries. But are these efforts effective? Are business objectives being supported and enabled? Are business processes being streamlined and simplified? Will changes make the company more profitable? Has a return on investment been targeted? Are all the systems and structures in place and available able to expand and change with the business?

The importance of good planning and good business process support to operating company systems is greater than ever. Facilitated Integration Technology (FIT) is uniquely qualified to provide assistance to process and manufacturing firms looking for improvement in business and manufacturing practices. FIT has been recruiting operations and technical management professionals from the process and manufacturing industry over the past few years, as they retired from major refining, pharmaceutical, food, consumer goods, chemical and petrochemical manufacturing companies. We have worked within this very talented group to evolve a set of methodologies and tools that allows unparalleled examination of a client's business and business processes to look for areas of improvement.

We use a number of well-tested tools, among them the FIT Business Process Model©, the FIT-Herlyn Best Practice Benchmarking Scoreboard©, and the FIT-Herlyn Cost and Benefit Analysis© Tool.

How Does Your Company Measure Up?

First, we configure a model of a client's business processes, working to modify the FIT Business Process Model© to accurately reflect a client's unique processes and practices. We then use the FIT-Herlyn Best Practice Benchmarking Scoreboard© against the model. The FIT-Herlyn Best Practice Benchmarking Scoreboard© employs a set of embedded industry best practices, based on the Herlyn Industry Best Practices™. Folkert Herlyn, the first CIO of a major oil company, started using Best Practices internal to this multi-national oil company. Upon retirement, he continued his work in consulting to refineries worldwide and, over the next eight years, gained a substantial understanding of failures, successes and of the 'things' that set one refiner apart from its competitors. The culmination of these years of work was the benchmarking methodologies of the Herlyn Industry Best Practices™. These we enhanced as a multi-company multi-disciplinary team to provide a set of best practices allow FIT Senior Consultants, themselves technical and operational managers from refining companies, to compare client current practices against the best practice benchmark to suggest improvement and change.

What is the Process?

The FIT Senior Consultants who have been involved in the interview process use the Client Business Process Model we have created from the generic FIT Business Process Model© along with interview notes to fill in the FIT-Herlyn Best Practice Benchmarking Scoreboard©. This tool takes all the business processes in the facility and breaks them down into several elements so that scoring is facilitated. An example is shown of one process in Figure 1, below. This is the first page in a set of four used to score the Planning and Scheduling process. The arithmetic scores are then cumulated with a weighting formula that takes many factors into account to give overall scores by business area. Suggestions for change are enumerated, along with accompanying economic benefit of change, as appropriate..

What Is the Value?

The results of this modeling and benchmarking effort are valuable, as they become not only the basis for improving and streamlining business processes but also the guidelines for enumerating change to the organization or physical plant, adding hardware, and selecting and configuring software to support and enhance improved processes. But this often is not enough to substantiate change in a large organization with many projects competing for funds. For this reason, FIT has created the FIT -Herlyn Cost and Benefit Analysis Tool©, which contains a set of factors that allows our consultants to determine the value of change to a client for his particular business and economic situation.

FIT's services structure is aligned so that a client can use as much or as little assistance from FIT as he wishes. All of the services from FIT can be expanded, reduced or segmented as appropriate to each situation. As may be apparent from the name of the company, we look to facilitate a client's organization through improvement or change, always with an eye to impact on the bottom line. We look to guide our clients toward improved business processes and support systems, optimizing their efficiency and productivity, and gaining maximum return from systems changes that make up the business support infrastructure. We specialize in assisting clients with business and technological changes that can have a positive impact on profitability and position in the world market.

©copyright Facilitated Integration Technology, Inc. 27/09/02