Last week, The Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts held a kaizen event to improve their rental processes. The current process is inconsistent and very confusing for all parties involved including the client, rental staff, administration, production staff, Ticketing Services, and Catering. In order to see what the current state of the process is, the team decided to map out the process by way of a swim lanes process map. Before the team began creating the process map, Bob Hiltunen-Director of Auxiliary Services, provided some great process mapping guidelines that really helped the team. They are:
- There is no right or wrong way to map
- You don’t learn how to process map, you process map to learn
- Process map what is, not what you would like it to be
With these guidelines in mind the team was able to create a process map that included each department/area that the process touches and all of the process steps from start to finish (see image below).
With the initial map created the team was then able to move forward in creating an “ideal state” process map. The ideal state captures the process in a perfect world with all the necessary resources available. The team was able to look back at the current state map to compare steps and people involved with the ideal state map. The team will continue to work on their ideal state in the next few weeks and then form a plan to move from current to the ideal. Check back to see the final results in a future post.
From the looks of this map there will be plenty of opportunities to improve value for the customer. Delivering a seamless and graceful process to the customer is very hard to achieve with so many different people and departments needing to be involved. Mapping it all out in current state and then comparing it to the ideal future state will hopefully make the gaps that need to be address pop right out!