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12 ways to Improve your Business Processes [2021]
“The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” – Helmut Schmidt
In this article, you will find many focus areas to improve your business processes. We start by explaining what we consider a business process and how important it is to implement, sustain and improve them. Depending on your starting point, we suggest how you can get started; you can skip this section and go straight to the focus are to improve your key business processes. If you are impatient, go straight to 12 ways to improve your business processes!
TLDR
The world of business processes is all about balancing compliance, productivity and agility in order to support you and your organization to deliver value to your customers consistently.
Business processes or work processes are repetitive series of activities (tasks, meetings, approvals, etc.) that together execute business objectives. Business processes are essential and everyone use them whether you are in a small company or a large enterprises, often most are not visible and transparent as their formalization is limited or deprecated.
Too often, business processes stay unformal, unwritten ("in people's mind") and this poses serious challenges such as relying too much on a few key individuals.
Improving business process is often link not only to the connection of the business process to the company goal and its productivity, it is also about its sustainability and the ability for a business process to be well embedded into an organization so that it can strives, evolved and improve over time. It is better to have a 80% efficient process that works and that is here to stay by evolving against the latest business needs that a more efficient process alienating people and a bit too rigid which will require higher one off costs to revamp and update every year or so.
Feel free to go straight to the 12 ways to improve your business processes to identify improvement opportunities for your team and organization.
Table of Contents:
What is a Business Process?
First, let us confirm what is a business process.
Let’s clarify that some experts and practitioners call them work process as well. Also, the sum of operational, managerial and supporting processes in one organization are sometimes referred to as the Operating Model of the company.
In simple terms, business processes are repetitive series of activities (tasks, meetings, approvals, etc.) that together execute business objectives.
Many work activities can be considered processes, usually if they share one or more of the following attributes:
“A business process is not an instance, a project or a procedure.”
Indeed, the business process define in which sequence a project’s gates and steps are ordered and what needs to be done at each of these steps. Procedures explain how each granular step of a process (thus the actual projects following that process) needs to be performed.
Project can also be cycles, for instance you have numerous operational and managerial activities that needs to be performed on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc.). The cycle level is the same as the project level.
A really challenging aspects of business processes management is to understand what really require a high level of prescription and therefore corresponding documented procedures. The more your work processes are operational the more they will benefits from procedures, on the contrary more managerial and strategic processes will necessitate liberty from the stakeholder in getting to the desired outputs.
Note: business processes that are very operational and can be defined very precisely should be the first ones to prioritize to apply RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to mimic human behaviors but getting machines to do it!
Business processes can be found in any fields, functions and industries. Below are some examples of mostly managerial business process:
The importance of implementing, sustaining and improving your Business Processes
Many business professionals, practitioners and consultants focus on the design and the implementation of business processes. They are looking at applying best practices in the context of the organization, its people, its culture and together with the right systems, tools and data. Usually, after a few months piloting the new process all extra spot resources to supporting the design and implementation move in other part of the business which often lead business processes to decay.
But it is wrong, here are why it is important to maintain and improve your business processes:
Improving business process can be distilled down to three complementing levers
1. Make sure your have the right design
Your business process should be simple enough to be understood and executed by people in the organization, the level of prescription needs to be well defined depending on the business process at play and typically the people involved in the process.
For example, if you need something done by creative people the process needs to formalize the work that needs do be done to help them streamline and structure their activities, facilitate communication and feedback gathering, etc. On the other hand something that needs doing hundred times a day such as processing invoices should be focused on efficiency.
Also, if you are designing a business process standard that will be performed by several parts of your business (example a budgeting process performed by several independent countries in your organization) you may want to proactively make it clear and precise what are the elements that must be done in a specific way (you can use procedures) and what needs to be done but the way to obtain the output is left to the specificities of that particular local entity.
2. Make it sustainable
Your process should be embedded and executed consistently to become second nature: what is the point of having the perfect design if it stays in a PowerPoint document on someone’s computer.
To sustain, your process needs to be well understood and specific focus about the value it brings to the company should be clear to everyone. Whether it is about profitability, cost, work life balance or anything else depending on stakeholders, it is key that everyone adopt the process for the long run as they win more than they lose by doing it.
It is essential that the process is supported by the leadership and enable by appropriate tools and systems taking the mundane and administrative work out of it as well as nudging people to do their part on time (no one like chasing people every time…).
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3. Improve continuously
Everyone talks about improving, I agree, it is key. One of the main challenge in organization around business process improvement is about the implementation of all the identified improvements and suggestions from the different stakeholders.
When a process is not written and depends on people doing things a certain way, to start implementing changes it requires someone to remember the changes and communicate through different medium and find manual ways to make the change stick.
It is particularly challenging with monthly processes where the opportunity to improve only happen 12 times a year. Having a digital twin of you business processes can be an excellent way to tackle this where improvements to the business process can be implemented in advanced using versioning and only becoming active in the future at a selected date so all these good ideas are not lost.
Your process will quickly become irrelevant if you don’t continuously improve and fine tune it to the latest business needs. If a business process is not necessary anymore because of a structural change in the business, then it is fine to let it die. On the contrary, if something still needs doing on a regular basis but in a different way than the design should be strongly updated then you’re back to step 1!
The speed at which you are going through the 3 steps will depend on your company, its maturity and its growth pace.
How to get started with your Business Process effort?
If you are just getting started or you feel you need a step change in your business processes right, check out the following (not so easy!) steps:
Perform an organization wide review of your ways of working to categorize and prioritize your business processes
Select a cross functional team that will be in charge of designing and documenting (ideally digitally!) your business processes, this should include at least:
Pilot your business process
Implement to the rest of the organization as relevant
Then strive to make it sustain and continuously improve it and go back to step 1. as often as necessary for your organization (at least every year, every 6 months would be better)
12 ways to improve your business processes
We have listed below 12 angles to look at your current business process to facilitate improvement opportunities identification and prioritization:
1. Start measuring your business processes
What get measured, get improved. Here the focus is to define leading KPIs that look at the process productivity, health and compliance to your standard. Once you measure this, root cause analysis and discussions like this will start happening:
a. the process is executing only 70% of the time, then the conversation should be is that because the frequency is not right? Or people are too busy maybe?
b. the process is always late, why is that? is this because people are firefighting, because other more important activities needs to be done? Because the inputs is not available at the right time from a system?
c. the level of compliance is only 40% meaning the process get mostly executed by the “wrong” people, should we modify the process? or upskill people, etc.
2. Is your process frequency spot on?
Sometimes we get into the habit of doing some activities on a regular basis, actually good routines are great. Though, sometimes business process frequency are based on what always happened. Maybe a weekly process started due to the pandemic in 2020 could now become a biweekly process reducing the workload by 50% Similarly, maybe a weekly reporting process should be fully automated so that it can be transformed in a less resource hungry daily review as the report is automatically generated.
3. Are all information and decisions captured and easily retrievable?
We all like having just the right amount of meetings, too much and we feel don’t do anything, too little and we feel isolated. In any case, regardless the amount off meetings, most people like to quickly return to their work at the end of meeting and rarely prioritized the documentation of meetings. Some company are better at this than others. But one thing for sure, is that if you make it easy to capture (ideally semi-automatically) these information within the right context (be it a meeting a task, etc.) without getting bothered with all the administrative burden, this will happen easily.
4. Make sure the right roles and responsibilities are anchored and adhered to
Do you have a clear RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) Matrix describing who needs to contribute in what way to the overall process and to each of the steps within it? Ideally you would want to do that not for specific individuals but to do it against business roles so that your standard stay relevant over time and across the organization.
5. Ensure sufficient skin in the game
In tandem with a RACI matrix, it is essential to link monetary and non-monetary incentives to your key processes. If something is really essential for the business then it should also be the same for the staff. If it is essential to the company, it is likely directly or indirectly going to support profitability and/or future growth, thus aligning people incentives to it can be good. Watch out though, not everything is about incentivizing!
6. Don’t forget past improvement ideas
Often processes are not improving as stakeholders provided suggestions in the past that were discarded or simply not implemented. Often, this is simply due to the fact that improvement implementation rely on the process responsible or process owner to anchor it by remembering about it in the future and informing people manually, etc. First, creating a log of all the improvement ideas and why they are considered or discarded well as when they should be implement is essential. Then, if appropriate, investigate business process management tool that can handle versioning of your business processes so that you tweak your process now but activate the changes in the future at the date you select.
7. Make sure all the necessary information are available in one contextualized place
When your need to perform a simple 10min task but you need to spend 50min to gather the date, chase people to send them to you, as well as running a few reports and clean up the data, you just don’t want to get started. It get delayed and often disappear in the abysses. So make sure all the information for a meeting or task are available easily will have great impact. It can be as simple as a well structured cloud based folder hierarchy to a more advanced tool creating a working environment pulling together all the necessary information you need.
8. Automate what does not need to be done by people
Clearly we cannot automate everything, us human, can do things machine cannot do. Of course machine can recognize dogs now but it needs a massive amount of data. When you only have a few scattered ambiguous information we are (for now) still the best. Instead of trying to be more productive on every process, you could simply plug a robot (Robotic Process Automation, also called RPA) to perform very repetitive tasks. Then you can have the same person managing the robot and use the remaining time for more value added task.
9. Ensure everyone is clear about the expected output
Regardless how obvious something may appear to us, we should not assume that everyone from their very personal perspective gets it the same way. A good way to ensure people are clear is to look at the process from their eyes and to do just that you can use the plethora of change management framework out there In the end, the rule of the game is to make sure people win more than they lose adopting a process.
10. Review your system log with Process Mining
Leveraging your system log can be a gold mine of information; this is particularly relevant for operational processes that are performed in systems such as ERPs. A process mining tool will easily give you a visuals outputs showing you how people operate and you can identify the deviation to standard, or find rationale to update your standards, and many more jewels. Unfortunately, for managerial processes, there are rarely logs available to be used.
11. Ensure the process is supported by a smart process orchestration tool
Once you defined your process, its steps, its frequency, its RACI matrix… nothing is preventing a smart tool to lay out automatically all the activities and meeting that needs doings brining all the information together in one place as well as taking care of the administrative burden of managing the meeting invites. For managers they can often spend 10% or more of their time just managing and reschedule invite. The system can become the “chaser in chief” instead of you (probably another 10% or more of many managers working cross functionally). It ca also automatically reallocated task when one team members is on holidays. And even more powerful, if a step of your process needs to be done for each product categories and your business launches many new ones every year, why wouldn’t you want to have something dynamically included these new categories as they appear? Without having to remember it with post it notes all over your desktop!
12. What if you simply stop doing a process, who would shout at you?
It can be a good way to know what can be stopped… Of course, maybe give a heads up to a few people in the organization so it is not seen as a inadequate behavior!
Partnership Manager – Fluvius
2 年Interesting, Julien! ??
MBA | MEng | Ingeniero Mecánico | S&OP | Logística & Supply Chain | Planificación Estratégica | Network Optimization |Profesor Universitario
2 年Very nice approach of becoming a process optimizer instead of a procedure writter. #walkthetalk
Manager de transition Supply Chain
2 年Very useful