Quality - Process Management

June 2014

The Concept of Processes

The process model consists in considering a company's goal to be to provide products and/or
services that meet client expectations. Thus, the company is modeled as a series of processes
that allows the company to identify client needs and transform these needs into a deliverable: the
product or the service.
From these elements, a process is defined as follows:
An activity or a series of activities that
use resources to convert input elements into output elements
with an added value.
Thus, the identification and formalisation of the company's processes consists in pinpointing the
different "activity areas" contributing to a common goal.

Types of Processes
The document FD X 50-176 published by AFNOR in June 2000 details the process approach
and defines the 3 process families:
The creation processes, which corresponds to the creation of the product or service and
therefore to the company's business activity
The support processes, which represent a generally horizontal internal activity that
ensure the company's smooth operation. The support processes are generally invisible to
the client (beneficiary). These processes include financial management, HR management,
training, etc.
The management processes (sometimes called the steering processes) correspond to the
definition of an organization's policy and a strategy and to the steering of the actions taken
to achieve the organization's goals.

Process Management
The goal of process management is to breakdown company activities into processes and
monitor them in order to line them up with the company's strategic goals.
Thus, a process management approach must include the following steps:
Definition and formalisation of the company's strategic goals
Analysis of exisiting company processes

Identification, for each process, of the input and output elements

Definition of interactions between processes
Formalisation of the performance criteria (performance indicators) for each process
Measurement of the performance of current processes
Suggestions to modify the existing processes
Proposal of new processes
Roll out and implementation of modification proposals
Measurement of new performances
Article written on 19 January 2006 by Jean-Franois Pillou
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