So current state analysis, what's that all about? Well, basically what we're trying to do with this is we're trying to understand what's happening now. When does it happen? How often does it happen? processes are involved when it happens, and so on. So you really try to understand what's currently happening.

Now in order to understand that properly, you might want to do a process flow. So we'll just pause there for a second and just ask the question, Well, why just not asking those questions we've already looked at Why are they not good enough? Why do we need to start doing more, but what you often find is just by asking those questions, it's a good start. But it doesn't give you enough information to really understand the current situation. So we make a lot of assumptions. So I'm going to introduce you to some tools that you might use to really get a better understanding about your current processes.

So you might want to do a process flow you might need To collect some data from maybe your key performance indicators, or the way you identify how current performance is, you might want to take some measures because you don't have the data available, you might need to analyze that data. Through analyzing that data, you could work out the frequency, how often these things happen, what the percentages are, the average the peaks, the troughs, so really just doing some number crunching on the current state, you might also do a trial to find out how often this thing happens. And actually what happens when it does, what's the cause and effect if you like. So go say go and have a look in your manufacturing area or go and have a look in the office or spend the day with your salesperson. Talk to operators and others to really understand what's happening.

So all of those in the current states are the sorts of things that you would do to find out really what's happening and I must say, me My experience, this is one of the areas that most people kind of don't want to be bothered with. So it feels a bit dull and boring, because actually what most of us want to do is get on with the business of improving it. We know we need to improve it. And we kind of think we know the answer. So we just want to get on and implement it. What the problem with that, though, is that we often find that we're implementing the wrong solution, or we're still solving the wrong problem.

So what this does is it helps us to really identify where the issues are, where the waste is, and exactly what is happening and why. So I really encourage you to actually spend some time at this current state analysis. The more you do here, the more likely you are to deliver your business improvement. So the first tool we're going to look at is this idea of creating a process map or a process flow. There's lots of ways of doing this. And I'm just going to use something really simple that anybody could use.

You can do much bigger Types of process maps called value stream mapping. That's not really what I'm going to do today. But we're just going to look at the principles around putting down a process of really understanding it. So here's the process for doing a process map. Firstly, I would recommend you create a list of what he's done. So if you're trying to understand what your process is, just think about Okay, in order for us to get from A to B, what do we need to do?

And actually what not so much what we need to do, but what do we actually do? So what you're mapping here isn't what the process should be your mapping what the process actually is. That, again, is something that people struggle with sometimes because they think about, well, actually, this should happen, and then this should happen in the initial happen. But that isn't what's happening. And if we analyze what should happen as opposed to what is happening, then we're going to miss the reasons why we've got the problem in the first place. So the first thing is creativity.

So what is done, then tries to order it approximately, of course, in many processes. Two things happen at the same time or more. So sometimes quite difficult, all right, but just generally put it in some order, then start to group the tasks into steps. So you can have a kind of higher level 678 steps to your process. Right the steps on individual cards and place from left to write in order. And then for the tasks that you've written down, of course, if you've used sticky notes in the first place, that's probably the easiest, put them on sticky notes.

And then you can put the sticky notes underneath those steps of the cards. So you might be a bit confused at that. So I want to show you what that looks like. So let's have a look at But the principle or the diagram, really, of how our process flow works. So these are the major steps that you've grouped together. So we've got step one, leads to step two, this is step three.

And so now I understand that often, it's a bit more complicated than that. But you can have two streams or three streams, that's okay. But just for ease of use for today, we just got one activity stream the steps one through two, six, the little activities that you've written down on the sticky notes, then go underneath that. So in step one, we've got these bits of detail here. So we do this and then we do this and we do this. Oh, and we need to make sure we, we do that and we mustn't forget, we always do this.

So you can put some detail in there just helps us to understand what each one of those steps are. So it's just a very simple way of doing it. We do it as a flowchart, which some of you might be familiar with. That can be really complicated and you end up with lines everywhere and crossing over and It's really confusing. This just keeps it really simple. So that's why I use this particular method.

So we're going to look at an example, which we've called material ordering. Because I wanted to think of something that you could apply both to a factory situation, or even in an office. So we've kind of, we've tried to hedge our bets a little bit on this. So the first part of the process is that someone notices we are low on material or materials. So that could be in a factory, or it could be that you run out of paper in your office. So you can think about it in those two different ways.

What happens next is that somebody has to call this person's called Joe to make a request for some more. When they start to notice he gets low, so call Joe to request more. Joe places the order with the supplier that's Joe's job. So she places the order with the supplier, the supplier processes the order then sends it to us. And we take the delivery of that, we then put that delivery in the story. So you could imagine how that's about paper, ink, any materials in your office or of course, it could apply to a manufacturing situation or catering situation, or anything where you've got materials that you need to keep track of.

Now underneath that, you've got some bit more detail. So OSHA checks the supplies every Friday, that's one of her responsibilities. She's got that on her to do list every Friday. And also, sometimes low stocks are noticed on an ad hoc basis. So if somebody goes in on Wednesday, and notice that the stocks are low, then they might report that before a schmo gets to check on the Friday. The next step will be more detail on there.

Well, Joe in order to make a request, she needs to have a materials code So obviously, that's part of the process, she needs to get hold of that. And she also needs to know how much he needs to order. So you could include that in your process, when it's required by and so on. When Joe places the order with the supplier, there is actually a minimum order required. So, Joe, nice to know that and of course, that needs to be done that process flow. Now part of her responsibilities to check to see if other materials are required.

So if Joe is going to put an order in for this thing, then it's cheaper and better if she can order something else at the same time. So she has to do a quick check that if there are other things that need to be ordered, then a combined order is created. She needs to generate a purchase order number through the system. And obviously then place the order she emails it through. Now, as I've said already, you could put all that into a flowchart. You can imagine how complicated that flowchart would look.

This is just a simpler way to identify what's happening. Now in terms of how long that's going to take, there's a five day lead time on that. So we need to understand that as part of the process. And also, our supplier does an account check on us. So of course, if we've not paid our last bill that can have some impact on whether we get our materials or not. So we need to include that in the process to once the delivery is taken, the delivery note is passed to Joe.

So then the delivery is taken, of course, Joe then passes that delivery note on to somebody else, and the order is complete is then put in the storeroom, and so on. There's probably more to that process, but that's as much as we're going to record there. So as you can see, even something as simple as making sure you've got enough paper in your printer requires quite a lot of steps. apply that to a bigger, more important process, let's say and of course, massive opportunity for getting things wrong in So you can see how if, if we haven't paid our bills, how that could hold up the process. If nobody notices the stocks allow, we have to wait till every Friday before Russia checks. We could find ourselves running out of paper, you could end up ordering twice as much because somebody notices, then orders it comes along on Friday, does a check finds that we're low, order some more.

So you can see how rare that process isn't particularly robust and is likely to create problems. But you probably wouldn't have noticed that if you didn't do that process flow. So it's a really good a way of understanding what's happening.