Eskom Procurement Book 2015

PURCHASING ANALYSIS TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

both internal and external to the company. Some processes produce products or services that are invisible to the external customer but are essential to the effective management of the business. These are referred to as administrative processes. Another category of management processes includes actions that managers take to support the business processes. Management processes include goal setting, day-to-day planning, performance feedback, rewards and resource allocation. A business is only as effective as its processes. Effective processes can help to accomplish business goals and objectives. People working within the processes can influence the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes to which they contribute. However, individual and teamproblem solving seldom focuses properly on total system process improvement. Many performance improvement studies focus on the improvement of individual procedures, often within a defined part of a company, e.g., within engineering or within manufacturing, but ignore the overall process. Process mapping has been shown to provide a proven tool with which to understand and change overall processes to improve overall performance. Process mapping is based on a systematic, structured analysis. The benefits of process mapping include reductions in product and service development costs, fewer system integration failures, uniformly better process understanding and improvement in overall business enterprise operations and performance. The following key points can summarise the basis process mapping concepts: • Establish what functions a process should perform. • Understand a process or system by creating a process map that graphically shows steps in a process and activities within these steps. • Structure the process map as a hierarchy with major functions at the top and successive process map levels showing greater levels of detail. A process map can be used to help make an existing process visible so that it can be understood more readily by those working in and managing it. It can serve as a basis for analysis of a process, to identify aspects of the process that need to be changed as well as those that should be retained. Finally, it can provide a useful framework for determining where to establish measurement points for ongoing management. Aprocess map considers activities, information and interfaces between functions. Process mapping usually begins with a functional process representation of ‘What’ the process is, separated from the design of ‘How’ the process should be, often referred to as the ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ processes. Process mapping starts by representing the whole process at a very high level with one box which names the process, for example, ‘Order Placement’. The single box is then expanded in more detail on another high-level process diagram with several boxes connected by arrows. These boxes are further broken down into sub-processes at increasingly higher levels of detail.

8.4.2 THE BENEFITS OF STUDYING COMPANY PROCESSES

8.4.3 THE PROCESS MAPPING CONCEPT

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