Welcome to the Better Processes Webinar

Editor's note: this transcript was generated by AI and has been lightly edited for clarity and relevance — some sections have been shortened or removed, and minor transcription errors corrected.

Full transcript

00:00:05Host

Good morning, and welcome to Triaster's webinar on the process improvement capabilities of the Triaster solution. We're going to look at the various tools available if you're a business analyst working to understand how to convert an as-is to a to-be.

00:01:39Host

Each white box is an activity, representing work being performed — the data associated with it is typically to do with cost, resources, and effort. The data is object-dependent: deliverable objects have very little of interest in terms of cost or time, but activities typically have quite a lot of data underpinning them.

00:04:52Host

With this data, I'm able to compute costs — wherever possible, we encourage you to use formulae. You can also flag any activity as value-adding, non-value-adding, or necessary non-value-adding.

00:06:04Host

What we're particularly interested in from an analyst's perspective is the cost of the whole end-to-end process, taking into account that there are branch points and alternative pathways. The best way to calculate this is through a simulation technique, where we walk through the process thousands of times, and every time we hit an object with a cost, we add it to the average.

00:11:14Host

For today, we're just going to run 1,000 simulations — it's not uncommon to see hundreds of thousands, even millions, of runs. Once complete, we can look at the summary of the outputs — that's the process status report.

00:12:37Host

In terms of cost, we're estimating £4,500. In terms of effort, 150 hours. We can see that the activities flagged as value-adding total 36.69 hours — so 8.54% of the total time is value-adding, which in Six Sigma is called the process cycle efficiency. If I compare an as-is with a to-be and the process cycle efficiency has gone up or down, that's a good clue as to whether the process has fundamentally improved.

00:14:48Host

This table shows every object encountered in the simulation runs — showing where the biggest contributions to cost are coming from. That's clearly where you'd focus your efforts if cost was what you wanted to reduce.

00:16:12Host

Every end-to-end process has more than one way through it — we call these pathways. This is quite useful, because it shows how often each pathway is executed, so you know which one to focus on for the biggest impact.

00:19:25Host

The process comparison report compares the as-is with the to-be. The as-is process currently costs £4,500 — there are some significant cost reductions to be had through automation, along with a big reduction in cycle time. As well as the basic parameters, we can see the value-add proportion, and tabulate the annual costings based on how many times you do this per year.

00:22:04Host

We're not suggesting simulation output alone is reason to change — it needs to be taken into account with all the other factors at play. But at least you have quantitative data in support of any decision to make a process change.