In the previous blogs in this series, we’ve had a look at how to identify broken business processes. We’ve also looked at the impact broken process can have on your business. Toady, we’re going to look at why it’s important to focus on business process optimisation.
Business process optimisation is all about finding smarter ways to do things. Usually, you should focus on the repetitive tasks currently being performed by humans. This part is a no-brainer, but a full process discovery process goes much deeper than that. It’s about identifying all processes in your operations, finding which ones are broken, and implementing solutions.
Here’s why it’s important to focus on improving your business processes.
Increasing productivity
Lifting productivity is one of the main drivers for any business process discovery. Ultimately, better efficiency improves productivity and in theory, increases your profits. At the end of the day, that’s what business is all about. Even the most community-minded companies can’t do what they do without making profits. So, productivity is the key.
Streamlining processes, making tasks quicker, and improving accuracy are all ways to increase productivity. By optimising your business processes, you’re able to do more with less. Also, you can do it quicker.
Business process optimisation improves staff engagement
When staff are frustrated by broken business processes, their engagement decreases. The highest performing staff are always happy and engaged. This makes sense, because engaged staff go the extra mile for the business.
Business process improvement is also about taking mundane, repetitive tasks away from humans. This means you can task your staff with much more interesting work, and also use their skills more effectively. Just another way that makes your people more engaged!
Make better business decisions
Improving your business processes isn’t just abut changing the way you do things. It’s also about implementing systems that give you better data. Data forms the basis of all business decisions, from where to deploy resources to improving the customer experience. With smarter busines systems, you ‘ve got much more data to support your business decisions.
Spend more time on business growth
This ties into staff engagement as well, but when those repetitive processes are handled by technology, your staff are free to do other things. So, rather than using resources for data entry and manual checking, you can let them focus on more important things.
The fact is, most people within your business are capable of much more. They’d also probably relish the opportunity to develop their skills in different areas. So, get them more involved in strategic planning, sales or marketing. These are the things that really grow your business.
Provide a better customer experience with business process optimisation
Finally, there’s not many things that matter more than the customer experience. If your customers aren’t happy, they won’t be coming back. Worse still, they’ll probably also be sharing their negative experience with their friends, family and online. A bad customer experience is catastrophic for business, so use business process optimisation to make it better. You’ll increase loyalty, and also spend less time dealing with customer issues.
Keep an eye out for Part 4 of our series, where we’ll give you some tips on fixing broken business processes.
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