Businesses with good processes allow their executives and managers to focus on their expertise without the need to get their hands on operational details. Business processes improvement is an effective way to boost the value of any company.
As your company change, it slowly becomes more complex with more people being in the operations, data starts to be segmented between different systems, and more variability opensin customerpurchase and expectations.
This results in processes that become complex, variable, and hard to control, which leads to more cost and business risks. To maintain growth, enhance margin, and develop a scalable company, these processes need to be assessed and improved.
The vital first step of process improvement is producing clear, achievable goals that link process initiatives to actual business value. These goals will be the foundation of your improvement project as well as the basis of your communication managers and employees. Ensure that it’swhy specific improvements need to be prioritized over others, and provide accountability for hitting targets.
Consider these areas where improved business processes will add value.
Cost reduction. Efficient processes take less time to execute as it has fewer steps and less wasteful activities.
Making a process efficient will reduce the cost of running the process itself and will likely reduce the cost of quality. One example is adding documents against acceptance, which frees up manual processing while increasing the security and speed of inward bill collections. If you have high-priced salespeople working on this, you have an expensive, revenue-generating person performing a task that can be accomplished by a provider.
Removing or streamlining processeslike this helpsyour employees generate more opportunities and reduce sales operations costs. Processescreated in a disciplined fashion can improve data quality on all orders, lessen mistakes, reduce the cost of quality, and improve productivity.
Customer experience and revenue improvement. Good processes on the revenue-making side of your business drive sales success and enhance product development and pricing accuracy. Effectively structured processes allow you to measure customers via their lifecycle and develop a continuously good customer experience that salespeople can use to sell and retain customers.
This also lets sales managers actively manage the sales process, boost sell-through rates and regulate pricing and discounts. It also usually aids in lessening the cost of customer acquisition or target investment more deliberately throughout the sales process.
Business management ease. Typical processes that can be measured mean that you can add those processes into systems, measure them, and check their outputs without direct and manual observation. Good processes allow executives and managers to oversee the business without being involved in operational detail. It allows leaders to spend their precious time working on the business itself.
Principles to follow
- Prioritize processes that have the most impact on either the top or bottom line.
- Process improvement success is focused on execution.
- Allow your employees to understand the goals. Poor adoption is a top reason process improvement plans fail. It is hard to get people to alter their habits if they can’t understand why.
- Measure your progress. Process improvement projects must have solid metrics that can be measured on an ongoing basis.
- Get assistance. The business environment changes continually, so having a service provider can aid in choosing the right goals and executing them correctly.
The challenge of finding priorities — figuring out what needs to be done with process improvement. As stated above,an efficient process can reduce the overall costs of business operations. From regular processes like documents against acceptance to complete systems overhaul, it will businesses tremendously to focus on processes that provide the most value.
