Improving business processes is an effective way of increasing your business’s value. A business process is any set of related activities that end up in your company supplying a service or product to a customer or client. Inefficient processes will result in disgruntled employees, unhappy customers, and missed delivery deadlines.
Why Improving Your Business Processes is Important
The most efficient way of handling inefficient processes is by improving them. Efficient processes minimize workload and ensure the smooth-running of product or service delivery. Business processes include simple activities such as invoicing clients.
When you fail to improve and streamline your company’s processes, you risk losing clients to your competitors and staying behind in the market. Improving business processes may be as basic as providing a methodology for performing a specific function like payment processing or distributing that function to merchant services.
When improving your business processing, the first step should be to develop clear, attainable objectives that link your processes to your company value. Here are five ways of improving and speeding up your business processes.
Reduce Expenses
When you have efficient business processes, you will execute them in fewer steps in less time. This will enable you to identify and eliminate wasteful tasks. When you make a process efficient, you reduce the expense of running it.
For instance, let’s look at a process to change a client quote to an order. Suppose you have a high salaried sales team performing the order re-entry. In that case, you have a costly, revenue-creating individual performing a task that can be carried out by someone else with less information on the sale.
Streamlining or eliminating this process will enable your sales team to create more opportunities and minimize sales operations expenses. Improving the process in a disciplined way will minimize mistakes on product deliveries to customers and improve delivery times.
Improve Revenue and Customer Satisfaction
Efficient processes on your company’s revenue section –marketing, sales, research and development, etc. – increase sales and improve product development and pricing accuracy. When you have well-organized processes, you can evaluate clients through their lifecycle and set up a regular excellent consumer experience that your sales team will use to attract and retain clients.
This enables you to directly manage the sales procedure, improve sell-through percentages, and control discounts and pricing. This will also help you minimize client acquisition expenses and intentionally prioritize investment in the sales process.
Minimize Risk
Consistent processes yield repeatable outcomes. Repeatable outcomes indicate reduced operational risk. For instance, if you manufacture goods, your quality control process should be predictable and repeatable to have the same chances of discovering flaws all the time in every shift.
A process that differs from person to person or individual to individual will often have many flaws and make it challenging to discover the root cause of the issue, thereby increasing the cost of quality. Therefore you should have rigorous processes to discover root causes and minimize the risk of the problems occurring in your business operations for a long time.
Process Automation
In many scenarios, repetitive and tedious activities are the main inhibitors of any business process. Repetitive activities not only limit performance and creativity but also consume a lot of your workers’ time. Additionally, tedious activities also affect the overall quality of the business process.
Fortunately, there are applications that automatically execute these activities. An Enterprise Resource Management software will minimize the time used to execute these activities and increase productivity. You can also automate various sales operations with marketing automation software.
Measure and Improvise
Process improvement is a slow procedure, and therefore it can’t fix operational issues overnight. You have to create a timetable for changes and improvements to measure and monitor the process improvement continuously.
After executing the changes, you should measure service and productivity levels. This measurement indicates the efficiency of the improved processes. The main aim of improving your processes is to increase the profitability of your business. By measuring process results, you stay on top of the changes and create more revenue.
As your business changes and grows, business processes slowly become more complex as more employees are engaged in the daily activities, data is split up between various systems, and there is more uncertainty in what consumers are buying and anticipating. When business processes are difficult to manage, variable, and complex, you have increased risk and cost to your company. To continue your company’s growth, and increase your profit margin, follow the above ways on business process improvement.
