Andy: I’m Andy Ray and this is another Tool Time Update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and the Entreprenuer’s Playbook. Today I’m going to give you a little systems thinking exercise for you to go through with your business as you’re thinking about change and improvement. One of the challenges that we have in our business is that our change initiatives or our improvement initiatives are just so massive it’s hard for us to break it down into executable parts and tie our efforts in with the results that we’re trying to generate. So what I want to give you is a simple business improvement model.

What I’m going to walk through here is something called the High Performance Model for Business and what it talks about is that my results that I always want to drive into my business improve growth, improve profit, more cash and more accelerated innovation – those are outputs in my business. They’re things that happen as a result of something and there’s a performance element to those results. Those results are created by core processes. Core processes at most businesses involve some kind of sourcing, some kind of sales process; some kind of fulfillment process where we have to get what we do to our customers or some kind of transformation process when we’re producing and creating finished goods out of raw materials.

Processes we give an X and those processes have a capability; what this model shows you is that the capability of all these processes combined are what generate out business performance. Processes drive performance. So if you want to improve performance it’s a simple matter of fixing the Xs. Fix the process capability in your core processes and you drive business performance improvement faster. This has been a Tool Time Update brought to you by PKF Texas and the Entreprenuer’s Playbook.