If you don’t have efficient business processes, you don’t really have a business. Ken Stork put it quite bluntly:
If you need a new process and don’t install it, you pay for it without getting it.
You might be thinking – alright, it’s been difficult enough to shift our business to use business processes. Is this not enough? Why would I want to optimize them?
Almost every business has some kind of business processes. Some of these are efficient, while others are less so. Business process optimization is all about ensuring that you have more of the former, and less of the latter.
For a business that doesn’t use processes at all, business process optimization means defining them first. Introducing any processes is an improvement over having none.
Having efficient business processes is critical for a growing business. If a business sticks to manually executing ill-defined tasks, it may survive, but it will hardly be able to scale. It is striking to find out that 92% of businesses fail to scale. To be among the other 8%, you need to make sure that you have documented processes, and that these are running efficiently.
As already discussed in our previous article, BPO is itself a process which helps organizations improve their processes. In this article we will share with you the top 6 ways how business process optimization can help your business.
1. Automate your business
The most obvious benefit of optimizing business processes is that it opens the doors for automation. If you don’t know what you’re doing, how can you delegate it?
Similarly, any process improvements enable you to build better automated systems. If you take this far enough, you can even build a full autopilot for your business.
2. Reduce costs
By streamlining your business processes, you’ll often be able to reduce your operating costs. For example, think about the time your employees spend on repetitive tasks every single day. If they didn’t have to do them, they could instead spend these hours on finding new prospects or adding additional value to the customer.
One of the top productivity strategies is to eliminate wasteful activities. For example, if a manufacturing company is not efficient, it may waste more resources than necessary. By finding a better, less wasteful process to manufacture its product, a company might save a lot of money.
Conversely, inefficient processes can cause inconsistent quality, slower production, and late deliveries. None of this sounds appealing – but it is a daily realm for many organizations.
3. Increase employees satisfaction
Repetitive tasks will suck out all the enthusiasm left in your employees and turn them into robots. Why not let computers do their tasks and leave the creative work to your employees? With optimized processes, you can leave bureaucracy and time-wasting behind and focus on adapting.
According to Atlassian research, the biggest cause for time waste is meetings. An average of 31 hours wasted every month. An estimated cost of this $37 billion annually. And this is only for US businesses.
You can change that through processes. By introducing processes, everyone will know what, how and when to do. By taking away the unknowns, you will end up with less stressed and happier employees. And due to the higher employee satisfaction you will have more productive employees and less labor turnover.
4. Improve quality and security
Quality and security are top priorities for many high achieving organizations. When processes are well-defined, you can have them modeled in software. Through such a software, you can easily improve your quality control and security.
Looking at the quality control, information systems can track if all the necessary steps have been taken on a given project. This ensures traceability and detection of invalid or missing parts.
In terms of security, a company that doesn’t have processes in place is often sharing admin passwords with the team members. When one member of the company leaves there might not be a way to revoke access. Having a defined process fixes this by having an onboarding and offboarding process.
5. Improve customer satisfaction
By having good processes, you can also make your customers happier. Some of the customers’ needs might be met automatically – example being scheduling appointments, follow up emails and so on. When they contact customer support, by having a well defined way of handling the requests you’ll be able to process them faster and cheaper. Additionally, processes help you serve your customers more consistently. They will probably appreciate that – a lot.
6. Streamline communication
Communication is an essential part of almost any business. Even communication can be seen as a process – and it can be improved. A good flow of information ensures less mistakes, faster execution, and better feedback. It can also inform employees about the direction where the company is heading and make them happier.
Your turn
Optimizing the business processes begins with the existing processes. We analyze them, and find how to improve them to meet certain business goals. If you would like to reap the above benefits in your business, contact us to help you with that.
