"Amerit brought clarity to a complex project. They provided the perfect level of detail, while minimizing the cost of their services. Their expertise and professionalism gave me complete confidence in their recommendations. I could not be more pleased with their work."

Director, eProcurement

Business Process Improvement Services

We believe that process excellence is a critical competitive advantage. Superior business processes lead to lower costs through workload reduction, and increased revenue through quality improvement and faster time to market.

Amerit business consultants have been called upon to assess and improve internal processes for a number of Fortune 500 companies. Our services include strategy development, process redesign and performance metrics scorecard development.

Strategy Development

Strategy guides all business activities and practices. Strategy can be at the corporate level - defining where a company is heading, or at the operational level - defining critical business processes. Amerit has facilitated strategic planning efforts for many public and private institutions and has extensive experience developing strategy at both levels.

Organizational strategy defines how an organization will create value. The value can be economic-based (maximizing profitability), or it can be utility-based (maximizing the value of services provided to end-users). Amerit helps organizations formulate their "value objective" or mission, and from this definition, we develop the organization's strategic priorities.

Operational strategy defines how an organization's strategic priorities will be achieved. This typically involves developing a three- to five-year vision statement that identifies the key elements of an organization's operations. These key elements will include organizational structure, personnel and training requirements, high-level processes and support/IT infrastructure requirements. From this long-term view, detailed tactics are developed to achieve each of the vision's key elements. Amerit provides strategy development services ranging from an accelerated two-day Visioning Session to complete strategic reviews.

Process Redesign

Process improvement

Effective process improvement requires creative design, precise analysis and careful implementation. Amerit consultants have extensive experience helping clients identify opportunities to improve the efficiency of their processes.

Amerit takes a hands-on approach, working closely with client teams to develop realistic solutions. Amerit's efficiency improvement projects typically pay for themselves within the same budget cycle.

Our approach to process improvement ensures projects produce results and that these results are adopted by all stakeholders. The main components of our approach are:

Problem definition
Root cause analysis and quantification
Solution identification
Solution prioritization

To promote participation and enthusiasm, Amerit begins a project by meeting with all stakeholders to ensure that their ideas and concerns are understood. We work with you to gain consensus on the problem definition and quantification. Thorough data analysis is used to identify root causes and their impact. During this phase, Amerit employs a number of creative techniques to overcome data challenges while minimizing resource requirements.

Recognizing the importance of user support, solution identification often involves client input through group sessions where findings are presented and ideas are captured. Solution prioritization is analytically driven with all decisions being supported by rigorous data analysis.

Process automation

Achieving efficiency improvements through automation is one of the most common process improvement strategies that Amerit employs. We believe that almost any process can be automated. However, automation may not always be appropriate because the cost outweighs the benefits, the risk and security issues are too high, or the organizational environment is not conducive to automation. Therefore, the crux of a process automation engagement is determining which processes are appropriate for automation.

We begin by building a process or transaction inventory. Amerit works with you to identify and document current processes, focusing on the following:

Purpose of the process
Who and how users are involved
Systems that feed, or are fed by, the process

With the transaction inventory complete, Amerit develops an evaluation framework. This framework uses a stage-gate process in which a series of filters are applied to each process. This quickly focuses evaluation efforts on the processes most likely to be appropriate for automation, while minimizing efforts spent evaluating clearly unsuitable candidates. Amerit then selects processes appropriate for automation by considering the cost/benefit, user feedback, risk and implementation challenges.

Performance Metrics Scorecard Development

Effective metrics must track the performance of critical business processes and propel management into action when targets are missed. An organization's measurements must reflect financial, operational and employee metrics. Most importantly, it must reflect the voice of the customer and how they feel about their experience with your products or services.

Business processes vary from company to company and industry to industry, so a firm's scorecard should align with its strategy, priorities and business plan. In developing performance measurement processes, Amerit minimizes the resources required to maintain measurements while providing useful, actionable information. Rather than developing a complex tracking process with many metrics, Amerit strives to identify the key metrics that best monitor success.