Streamlining Business Processes: How to Get Started
When you run a business, you might think too much about how efficient your current business processes, practices, and workflows are. But, as the business starts becoming more complex, leaving things as they have always been might not be in your business’s best interest.
At this point, streamlining your business’s practices becomes paramount as it helps you increase your business’s efficiency. This will often involve simplifying tasks, removing unnecessary steps or process repetitions, and reducing waste. Doing all this is easy to say but harder to implement. This is why we are going to look at how you can go about streamlining your business processes.
How You can go Streamlining Business Processes
Assess Your Existing Processes
The first step in streamlining your business practices is assessing your existing processes. You need to look at everything your employees are doing clearly and in an unbiased way. You can also ask your employees about any challenges they face during their workday. Remember that your employees will be at the heart of implementing any new practices you put in place and knowing what frustrates them currently will help you make changes that will benefit them and help them improve their workflows.
Next, take stock of your inventory and office. In particular, take note of your filing and process dissemination systems, computer software and the hardware, the use of paper records in the office, and how data flows from one employee to the other.
For each of the areas you examine, take notes so that you may use them in the next step of the process.
Analyze the Results
Once you have data from your assessment, you need to analyze it to find areas where your business processes are breaking down. It may be that employees are finding it harder to make product orders or serve your customers because the computers or internet they use are too slow.
It may be that you are using an outdated filing system that makes it harder for employees to not only find information but also disseminate it to other employees. Your customers might complain that it takes too long to get hold of a helpful human or your warehouse may be so disorganized that it leads to long wait times and delays in your shipments.
Once you understand all this, you need to find ways to correct all the issues that are making it harder to complete tasks, serve customers, or keep the business going.
Find Areas of Focus
Using the results of your analysis, you should rank each of the issues you have found on a scale of one to ten. This rank should place each process and task in order of importance and the impact that correcting each issue will have on the business. More important processes and those that will have a larger impact on the business as a whole should be ranked a ten.
Keep in mind that what is important to you and your business is vastly different from what another business might consider important, so context matters. For example, getting your warehouse organized so employees can find products faster and to reduce shipping times might be important to you, but for another business, reducing the number of time customers spend on the phone is important.
Value Chain Analysis
In addition to analyzing your business and finding areas of improvement, you should also analyze all the tasks employees carry out and find out if they can be improved or eliminated. As with analyzing your potential issues in your business, the tasks should be ranked according to the importance and impact they have on your business. For example, the packaging design for a business that sells orange juice is important, but it might not be for a business that sells ice.
Tasks that do not add a lot of value and that your employees do not have to handle directly, such as logo design, can be outsourced. This can not only lower the cost of completing those tasks, but it can also free your employees to handle tasks that have a bigger impact on the business.
Automation
Automation touches on all the reasons why you need to streamline your business processes. It helps simplify tasks, helps eliminate unnecessary steps and repetitions, and cuts waste. A good example is in the product ordering process. Using automation, you can fulfill the order, fill out order confirmation information, send this information to both your sales and distribution teams, and have the product shipped in as little time as possible. You do not need to send any emails or transfer paper records from one department to another because all this is done for you.
Business owners should remember that there are some pitfalls associated with automation that they should be aware of. One of these is finding applications that will help them streamline their business processes and then trying to fit those applications into their processes. The right approach to automation is the opposite. Only after you figure out what can be automated (if it is worth automating) and how it can be automated, should you find an application or automation process.
Also, business owners should take extra care to ensure the amount they spend automating various processes does not outweigh the time and cost that will be saved using that automation.
Reduce Waste
A major reason why automation is such an important part of streamlining your business practices is that it helps reduce wastage that causes bottlenecks in your workflow. Such bottlenecks include lack of access to materials and information, equipment deficiencies, and the technical inability of your employees. Because of these and other factors, a business might see wastage of time, resources, materials, and money.
The adoption of lean principles is an important step for any business that wants to eliminate waste and improve process efficiency. Lean is a management practice that focuses on the same goals as streamlining your business practices, including reducing waste, improving efficiency, and increasing revenues.
Because of how big a role lean plays in helping eliminate waste and improve business processes, there is a high demand for people with the right skills, especially in the manufacturing sector where wastage or inefficiency in one area can have a detrimental effect on another areas. Also, these skills translate and transfer across different sectors and industries, and this is why universities are combining degrees in lean manufacturing with business degrees. You can visit this website to find out how you can earn an MBA and a degree in lean manufacturing at the same time.
Optimize Your Handoff Processes
A handoff happens when one person or department passes information to another. Handoff is critical for fast-paced businesses that rely on everyone having the same information or receiving the information they need as soon as they ask for it.
A poor handshake process introduces time wastage and cripples your business processes if the information is sent incorrectly or to the wrong person or department. To improve this process, you can put guidelines and communication channels in place that help ease and hasten the process of sending information from one part to another. This system should also be robust enough so it cannot be accessed by malicious actors, and it needs to have safety options to ensure it does not cripple operations if it goes down.
Use Solutions that Already Exist
Unless you work in a very niche business segment, it is likely that a business has already automated the processes you want to automate. If there are process automation solutions available, you should try to see whether you can implement them in your business. Some process automation software also comes with libraries that can help you create personalized automation solutions instead of starting from scratch.
The Benefits of Streamlining Your Business Processes
One of the benefits of streamlining your business processes is time-saving. Time is a precious and finite resource that should be used as efficiently as possible. Streamlining your business processes allows employees to make the best use of the time they have, which improves their productivity.
It also helps you save money. The biggest savings come from automating different processes. For example, there is no longer any need to print anything on paper or assign a messenger to take these printouts of the departments that need them. By using digital systems, you eliminate these processes and save money in the process.
Streamlining your business processes also allows for better communication. If your employees have a central hub where they communicate, the chances of missing a message are greatly reduced. Also, employees do not have to waste time moving from one office to another, seeking approval or a signature for something. Everything can be done through the communications hub that already exists.
The advantage of using digital systems is that you can save everything to the cloud. Doing so makes it easier and more convenient for employees to access documents. Also, using cloud storage ensures no documents get lost, and that employees can find the documents they need in a matter of minutes when they need them.
Although streamlining and optimizing your business process can be expensive and time-consuming, the benefits of doing so often outweigh the cost and time it takes. The most important thing to remember is that all the optimizations you implement should save your business money and make up for the time and cost involved in eliminating unnecessary processes, waste, and bottlenecks in your business.
