How to improve business processes effectiveness in a company?

Every business structure fundamentals its actions on processes. Document needs to be brought, invoices paid, products packed and sent. All the operations done by a company are indirectly influencing its condition. That’s why it is worth it to take care of the organization from the basics.

Many enterprises are wondering how to improve business processes realization. Because of that we decided to gather all the most important information and mistakes made by firms. In short we will take a look at why business actions should be optimized, how to automate workflow and also how to improve business processes effectiveness in a company.

What is it worth to improve business processes?

A penny saved is a penny earned. Old saying has a strong implication over here. The optimization of just one process in a short time won’t make any significant difference, however in the long perspective it can result in quite impact-full effects. It applies to both reduction of processes costs and the time it usually takes.

Often business processes improvement means standardization of them. That means benefits for the clients, employers and the managers. Therefore the whole company is more stable, products equal and our workers know exactly what they need to do. Countless human errors are being avoided that way, while our staff becomes more satisfied with their job.

Additional benefits can come from data optimization in the form of digitization, which helps to store and process information more easily in a safe way. They are also easy to access at any time from any place.

How to improve business process realization in a company?

Crucial in business process optimization is utilizing the power of ERP systems. Transferring most of the data and documents, as well as processes is a first step towards an effectively working company. On the internet there are plenty of guides on process management. We wrote about it in the article How to prepare for implementation of Document Workflow.

Having an informatics system designed specially for your firm, is it much simpler to implement changes and to communicate them to the team. The unhindered information exchange and understanding of them by personnel can lower the number of errors made from the lack of experience or knowledge. Every employee should know which tasks are his and how exactly to perform them. 

It is recommended to create knowledge collections about procedures inside the company, in a way so everyone can have access to it at any given moment. It allows for easy experience exchange, especially helpful for new employees.

Poor effectiveness can also be caused because of downtimes. Those usually come from the usage of wrong tools or communication problems. It is always a good practice to provide our staff with the best resources, so they won’t have to worry about irritating things that could be easily avoided with proper tools. One example of this can be found in OCR systems, which can automatically gather data from screenshots (scanned documents) and assign them to right fields instead of it being done manually by the worker. Similarly with digital signatures. They can save plenty of time every single day.

Downtimes can also be reduced by letting our employees work at any moment, anywhere they want. Not every firm is able to perform in this business model, but most of the office jobs could at least try this solution. One of the downsides though, is that we usually need to implement an electronic archive in which all the documents and information will be stored.

How to automate workflow?

Workflow automation is a task that is not only huge for a company, but has also significant influence on the entirety of the firm. This decision should be made thoughtful and planned carefully, basing on analysis and measurements of processes in real time. Not every action requires full automation. We got to distinguish which processes need to be automated partially and which at all. The next step is designing a complete automation strategy and the implementation process, distributing tasks fairly and effectively between every department and IT department. If right now your employees are having problems with overwhelming amounts of work, that can be a good moment for delegating tasks between branches or automation of them. The automation strategy also implies choosing the effect measurements of changes made. How do we want to measure if we are making progress or not?

The automation platform implementation process itself should be based on gradual digitization from the easiest to hardest flows. This method is much more practical, than moving all objects at once. Naturally it also means that the implementation process is longer and can take anywhere between a few weeks to over a year of constant transferring and optimization of processes. The answer to a question How to automate workflows was more deeply explored in this article.

Summary

Is it worth it to improve business processes? The answer is obvious. Thanks to it our company can profit in many ways. First of all, the cost and time of actions can be reduced. Employers make less mistakes and the risk of information loss is close to none thanks to data digitization. It is easier to access it at any moment of the day, without even being in the office. It all together ends in standardization of the processes and the products itself. That makes our workers more satisfied, since they know what to do, while most of their boring, repetitive tasks have been passed to machines.

The improvement of the business processes realization in a company can be conducted in a few ways:

• Implementation of ERP/Workflow system
• Process automation
• Electronic archive application
• Communication improvement
• Downtimes reduction, ex. with the usage of OCR and digital signatures
• Process planning and knowledge transfer designed in a way, so every employee (even freshly hired) will know what he needs to do and how

Automation on the other hand should be based on precise analysis of a company’s processes. Only after that we are able to create a clear automation strategy, which can effectively support the work of individual employees and whole departments. Implementation, though it can take a long time, should start from the most simple workflows, slowly graduating with difficulty.