Page 227 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

208 The Disney Way

The process of Dream, Believe, Dare, Do created a map that made
it easy for me and my team to chart a route and make it to our des-
tination of business success, unity, and fun for all of us, and most
importantly, our guests and children.
Jeff Merhige, executive director YMCA Camp Kern

We can’t emphasize strongly enough the importance of implementing
some system for gauging quality level, process time, customer satisfaction, and
product cost, as well as negative elements such as errors of judgment and process
mistakes. All too often, companies give little thought to measuring processes in
their entirety, even though doing so need not be a complicated task. But with-
out measurements, an organization cannot possibly know which processes are
working efficiently and effectively, what products and services are meeting qual-
ity standards, and whether or not customer requirements are being satisfied.
Identifying processes and mapping the functions involved are keys to
increasing efficiency. In many organizations, however, processes seem to be
hit-or-miss affairs, the result of haphazard growth. When a team takes the
time to map the details of a process, the results are usually an eye-opener.
“Why would anyone design a process like that?” baffled executives ask. No
one did design it, of course, and that’s just the problem. The process simply
mushroomed in all directions as well-meaning managers added a step here
and required a memo there. Before long, what once was a relatively smooth-
functioning process has turned into a Hydra-headed monster.
Dr. William Cross, the vice president with whom we worked at Mead
Johnson who was first mentioned in Chapter 4, found this out when teams
in his department decided to take a look at certain key business processes.
They uncovered many redundant and non-value-added elements that had
been built into the system over the course of several years. Dr. Cross was
astounded to discover that mapping a single work process related to releasing
a new product produced a “flow chart that when it was all put together end
to end, was about seven feet high and about two and a half feet wide, and
was in very small print. So it was extremely complex.” 77
By mapping out the details of the complex process, however, the team
was able to determine which steps could safely be discontinued. The new
streamlined process reduced the usual cycle time for a product release by
about two weeks.
Something similar occurred when Bill Capodagli was working with
the South African utilities company mentioned in Chapter 9. After every