If there’s no real doubt on the necessity of the process itself, that is not necessarily the case for the steps inside the process. Part of the Process Analysis and of course Process Improvement journey will be to qualify these steps. So before starting the Process Analysis it can be interesting to keep in mind we can breakdown the steps in a process into three categories:

• The Value added Process Steps:
  1. The business or the customer is willing to pay for
  2. The step change the function or the purpose of the product/service
  3. Must be executed correctly at the first time
• The Non-Value added Process Steps
  1. These steps do not affect the function or the purpose of the product
  2. The customer is not willing to pay for it
  3. Can include rework afterwards
• The Necessary Process Steps
  1. It’s also considered as a Non-value added step
  2. Comes from Legal, governance, company, organizational requirements
• The Non-desired Process steps
  1. The Process steps that should not be part of the process ! Typically here, we’ll need to quantify them and also calculate their impact on the global process performance. Note: They must not be removed from the Process Analysis beforehand, but will be dropped when the process will be optimized later for sure.

Let’s summarize these categories in a table like this: