Managing the business processes

Whats the difference between business decades ago and businesses now ? what has changed them ? What has become competitive advantage as Mr C. K. Prahalad
would ask ? Lets pick up companies in any industry and put some basic questions
1) Were these companies able to deliver standard experience on every customer touch point?
2) Did these companies care about their internal processes of inbound, outbound logisitics and operations as mentioned by Porter in value chain
3) What was the core strength considered by these organizations and what was the competitive advantage over which they relied?

Lets start with the first question the most important one in every context . The ultimate aim of every business is to make customer happy and we know gone are the days when customer was happy by just getting what he has asked for , at times he had to be satisfied in much lesser than what he has asked and he was still happy. Considering the example of Bajaj Chetak , once the vehicle which ruled all hearts of all Indian . It worked like a charm across the age
sections. customers have to wait as long as one year to get one for themselves and company was in no hurry to scale up or start a new venture , so much so when Honda approached them to start a producing motor bikes , Bajaj turned it down assuming scooter business will always remain what it was at that time.
Considering this was the case we can very well assume what would have been the customer service and how customers would have been dealt , there was hardly any effort to build customer relationship afterall it was all game of demand supply equation , for huge demand there was a limited supply so no one needed to pay much attentio about customer experience , pre purchase , during purchase or post purchase.

Consider the same bajaj in today's scenario , they are running a campiagn which no one ever heard in India. For Bajaj XCD 135 CC bike they have put a challenge to the customer saying they can come and test drive the bike and if after that they purchase any other bike than Bajaj will reimburse the price for other bike. Where seems to be focus today , entirely on what customer experience , even though this example is talking about experience of the product but
similarly experience of the processes and customer serices have also taken strong ground thats why the new advertisment of Maruti talks about how customer can get a Maruti care service almost at any part of the India from rural to urban area.

In nutshell we have moved from the times where Mr Ford declared I would give model of any colour to the customer as long as it is blcak to the era where youcan customise your car over web and it will be produced for you. It is with the help of streamlined processes that organizations are able to develop highly personalised experience for customers.
Having extablished some gound on the hypothesis that customer experience is important , lets see an obvious extension to it . If customer experience is important than can an organization make sure that it delivers same customer experience gain and again . A product may certainly deliver same customer experience again and again but what about service? Any service where lots of manual intervention is required will be a great challenge for standardization.
For such kind of activities what is required to have a process map and train all the employees on that process map across the locations. Similar kind of efforts were put by outlets like Mc donald and Pizza huts and thats how you get same experience ( of food as well as service) across all the outlets but upto than it was just a vision worked out withwhatever help available around , today we have made an entire methodology which is less science and more art called Business Process Management. There are lots of tools and standards to model organizational processes .
Its now when organizations have realized that a successful business not only means a block buster product but also efficient and standard processes. It is also an effort to manage business processes explicitly considering there are very frequent changes in business and related processes and if we don't have a strong hold on our processes it will be difficult to respond to changing business enviornment.

Our second concern was regarding internal processes which include various processes in the value chain of an organization, In old times when organizations had customers flocking on thier door for whatever they create , they had very less time to think about various internal processes and optimize them for maximum benefit. It is after Motorola and GE taught the value of 6 sigma to the world , we realized how much can be gained by exploring in this area. There have been various process improvement techniques and 6 sigma pioneered all of them but what was missing ? To have detailed process maps and micromangement of each of the assocuted processes, To make sure that each complex process is broken into small ones and each modular process can be handled seperately. 6 Sigma was a good tool for improving but not for automating because 6 sigma treated etire process as a whole and concentrated more on the quantative abilities to come to a conclusion.

Third and another differebce between businesses done in past and today is Identifying the core stregnth or competitive advantage of your business. Couple of decades back no one thought that processes could be core strength for an organization and then emerged examples like southwest airlines , which has changed the rules of aviation industry by just redifning thier internal process from the way fleet is scheduled to the way a carier is prepared for the next flight , creating end to end cost effective systems.

Its very simple to understand that highset benefit lieas in controlling each and every critical process of business from selecting a vendor to producing goods/ services and delivering to customer. In todays volatile world it is important not only to develop these processes but also to map them and keep them with you in codified form so that you can always go back to find out whether these processes are being followed , if there is any change needed and how best
they can be automated.
The basic need of dividing complex processes and than modeling , monitoring and managing them has given birth to BPM

If you are a leader , you should be able to follow well:

What could be one of the most turning point of the fight in great Mahabhart story . The Leader of the era Krishna who had been continouslt in the fore front of all the incidents suddenly takes the role of a Charriot driver for his best friend Arjun. It did not take him a split second to decide whether in coming ages it would hurt his image , whether it would immediately demote him from a heavenly deity to just another earthling and even more inferiors in the community , just a charriot driver.

I feel odds have turned other way round because it is this phase of Krishna's life he has delivered the most respected wisdom of Hindu Mythology - Gita . It is in this role he has influenced the entire saga in such a way that no one else could have done so including elmination of Karna or Jaydrath like warriors .
I am trying to think something else as well , Krishna was the leader of entire story , un disputed decision maker for pandavas bu he also comes across as the best follower giving command in the hand of Arjun.
Some one who has already proven leadership skills must also be able to follow well , there will be many hurdles in his way to the follower topmost being his ego self , already been in a position where he has only given orders now putting him in the shoes of order taker will be dificult, what can add salt to injury is if this time some one who has followed you is going to lead you or some one who is not of the same status.

Even though there are all kind of risks associated when a leader steos down to be follower but if he successfully does it with a humble heart than he may emerge a greater leader , almost a legend