Process optimisation consulting for the DACH Mittelstand

Process optimisation is the practice of making the way a company actually works visible, then removing the handovers and system breaks that cost time and money. At Dreher Consulting it runs as three connected practices: process management establishes and owns the processes, robotic process automation takes the rule-based ones, and change management carries the new way of working into daily operations.

Process management is one of the practices inside process optimisation. It answers which processes exist, who owns them and where they break, and it produces documented processes with clear responsibility. Process optimisation is the wider discipline that also decides what should be automated, what should deliberately stay manual, and how the people affected are brought with the change.

Before. From our experience, a selection made on undocumented processes turns into a requirements exercise during implementation, when changing anything is expensive. Establishing the processes first gives the selection something to be measured against, and it usually shortens the implementation rather than delaying it. The system should follow the process, not define it.

The stable, rule-based, repeatedly executed ones — where the rule is written down and the exceptions are rare. Most processes that look automatable are not: they carry judgement someone has never documented, and automating them locks in a decision nobody has agreed. Finding that line is the work, and the honest answer is sometimes that the rule set simply needs extending first.