by 
The 21st century is marked by non-stop technological innovation. Take Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company, for example. The organization is a reference in Brazil when it comes to process management and innovation. In 2007, in order to sustain its financial growth, it chose to transform its management model and organizational culture.
Administration became process-oriented, allowing the responsibility for corporate results to be shared among process owners. This shift enabled Natura to grow by 5.6% in that year’s first nine months. There was also a 49% increase in its market share through consultants, who, in turn, observed a 46.2% reduction in wrong deliveries.
Similar to this case, we can recall various other transformation stories that revolutionized businesses. In another example, in 2016, the Williams Formula 1 team set the record for the fastest pit stop with pilot Felipe Massa in 1.89 seconds. In 1950, pit stops took approximately 1 minute. Analogously analyzing, how is it possible to transform processes and improve results?
To answer this question, we first need to understand what types of transformation can be applied to a process. The CBOK book from ABPMP says: process transformation has a range of impacts that include continuous improvement, redesign, reengineering, and paradigm shift.
Within our organizations and even driven by Lean Manufacturing, SIX Sigma, and TQM (Total Quality Management), we tend to evolve processes through a lens of continuous improvement. This is a strategy that indeed generates results, and the impacts of the change are smaller, making it much easier to apply with great adoption from its involved parties. However, often a given process, as it was originally designed, no longer follows the overall business evolution, and in these cases even continuous improvement will not yield the same significant results.
Redesigning a process presents itself as a solution for these situations, as we rethink the business end-to-end while maintaining fundamental concepts. This makes it necessary for us to advance and study the need for reengineering.
Reengineering impacts all levels of the business, radically transforming how functional areas should work. These two forms of transformation, redesign and reengineering, commit to changing the process and cause minor impacts on the product or service offered. In other words, even after the reengineering of an automotive process, we will still have a car as the result of the process. Perhaps in less time, eliminating waste, causing fewer environmental impacts, and improving the financial result of the company, but the final relationship with the customer will still be through the purchase of the car.
One might think that these three forms of business process transformation would be sufficient for a company’s survival in the competitive market. But often the only way out is a paradigm shift. Still analyzing the example of the automotive industry, we can conclude that a person buys a car with the ultimate goal of traveling from one destination to another. Given this need, the factory offers its customer a solution: the car. What would happen to the automotive market if Fiat stopped selling cars as a product and leased them as a service? In this model, the customer would pay a fixed monthly fee entitling them to a complete car with all safety features and key technological accessories. For the customer, this would change the way they consume the product of that brand, and for the company, it would be necessary to completely rethink its vision, mission, and values.
This happened with the mobile phone industry with the arrival of smartphones, with the music and film industry after the advent of iTunes and Netflix, and also with the transportation service through Uber. The truth is that a paradigm shift impacts first on customer habits and beliefs, and consequently, on the entire market consumption dynamics.
In conclusion, it is evident that due to ease of implementation and the impacts caused, the market initially adopts continuous improvement as the primary tool for process transformation. However, in the century we live in, we need to reverse this order, first analyzing the feasibility of a paradigm shift, moving on to reengineering, redesign, and finally, continuous improvement.
If your company cannot change market behavior, others certainly will, and you will be forced to catch up with the losses. Try Fusion Platform for 15 days and see how optimizing your company’s management can bring more results to your business.
