Process improvement approaches.

Only organizations able to adapt rapidly to the continuous changes prompted by the market succeed in remaining in force. These organizations invest efforts in analyzing their processes to improve their service quality, optimize their costs, and reduce their time. Some of the different approaches to be taken into consideration are as follows:

• Process re-engineering: This approach seeks a drastic improvement and implies a radical change that breaks paradigms so that it rebuilds every process that is part of the organization. Also, it demands a lot of effort and resource consumption; thus, it is classified in the high-risk category. Likewise, it is generally adopted when current performance is highly deficient.
• Process redesign: This approach is not as radical as the re-engineering and aims to improve the degree of competitiveness by optimizing a part of the current process. Also, it impacts the structure of the processes and is classified in the medium-risk category.
• Process improvement: This approach is evolutionary and progressive, limited to small changes continuously, and classified in the low-risk category.

The choice of the process improvement approach will depend highly on the organization’s current situation.