BITKit

A Business Improvement Toolkit

Client:

Lothian and Edinburgh Enterprise Ltd (LEEL)

Problem:

To improve performance and provide a better service to customers, organisations need to understand their business processes, the way in which these processes interact, and the interfaces between them. At present, most business process improvement is carried out without the benefit of task-specific tools. Most methods are paper-based, and require a considerable amount of time and effort to set up and to manage to ensure correctness and consistency throughout an organisation.

To get over the initial hurdle, external consultants are usually involved, putting the task out of reach of the pocket of most smaller companies. Even when a consultant is employed, he is normally not able (or often willing) to leave a system behind that the staff of the organisation itself can use and extend easily.

In order to understand their business processes, organisations need a specialised toolkit which provides targetted support for visualising their business, and for identifying ways of improving their overall performance.

Approach:

BITKit takes an approach which allows a model of the enterprise to be tailored from standard, generic components. The model is presented to the user as a set of inter-related diagrams which show the processes involved and the interfaces (both internal and external) between them. On this basis, improvement decisions and their effects can be quantified and examined using standard business tools by company staff at the appropriate levels within the organisation.

The BITKit toolkit provides a library of generic business processes which can be changed to model a specific company. Once the model has been constructed and understood, quantitative information can be added so that the critical factors that influence the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation can be identified. When these have been located, the model can be updated so that the effect of making changes to the business can be investigated, providing a what-if capability and a greater understanding of the overall enterprise and the potential impact of external effects.

BITKit has been designed to run on an IBM-compatible PC under Windows.

Main Features:

BITKit supports the modelling of the enterprise as a set of individual, interdependent processes which provide the high level view of the system. These can be expanded into more detailed sub-processes and activities. Each process or sub-process is structured to provide performance information--such as Lead Time, Activity Based Costing, Effectiveness and Key Process Skills--at the Process Owner level. The owner can investigate approaches to improving the process within the context of the enterprise, identifying changes that will have an overall positive (or negative!) effect on the business.

The enterprise is visualised as a diagram made up of nodes and arcs, with the nodes representing the processes and sub-processes, and the arcs representing relationships between them. By making changes to the diagram, the model of the enterprise is immediately altered.

By providing libraries of generic business models which can be readily customised to match a company's individual circumstances, company staff can take ownership of the modelling process at an early stage.

BITKit provides a supportive framework for visualising the business whilst ensuring consistency and completeness throughout the model and better understanding throughout the company. Once a model has been agreed, different analyses may be carried out, and the relative influences of the different processes and sub-processes on the overall business may be determined. For instance, a gap analysis of the Key Process Skills required for an individual process against the pool of available existing skills will help determine the actions needed for achieving improved lead times. Improvement plans and skills development programmes can readily be formulated and tested against the model.

Quantitative analysis of the enterprise model can be integrated with standard PC-based management tools. The information held in the model (maximum possible throughput, actual throughput, process time, etc) can be examined using tools such as Microsoft Excel, and reports are output in Microsoft Word format.

Implementation:

BITKit is based on AIAI's multi-platform Hardy process modelling system which was developed in collaboration with Hitachi Europe Ltd.

For more information:
contact r.rae@ed.ac.uk