All firms are built on processes, which are tasks that a company has to carry out regularly and can be anything from generating reports to shipping a product.
How efficiently these processes are carried out, though, can be the key differentiator between a great and an average company.
By streamlining your business processes, you’re ensuring that each process is operating at peak efficiency, which can significantly boost company performance and productivity.
So in this article, we’ll see what business processes are and why you should streamline them.
What is a business process?
Business processes are a series of steps carried out by teams or individuals to accomplish specific business goals. It’s something that every company does, whether they deliberately create process workflows or not.
What makes a business process different from a task is that it’s repeatable and not a one-time thing.
For example, when hiring new staff, you interview them, make them sign a few documents, give them a tour of the office, and introduce them to other employees working in the company.
For each new hire, you go through more or less the same process (with a few variations if necessary).
The bad news is that some of a company’s processes are often inefficient and over-complicated for no reason. This can hinder the operations downstream and result in reduced productivity.
This is why making a deliberate effort to examine existing business processes and streamlining them using Apromore is vital to ensure your business stays competitive in today’s market.
Why You Should Streamline Your Business Processes: The Benefits
Every business aims to get the maximum return on invested capital. If you are looking to level up your business, here is how streamlining business processes can help you.
Enhances time management
Businesses often have limited time frames to complete tasks. By streamlining business processes, employees don’t need to wait for each other to complete interdependent tasks.
Instead of having to contact various departments, workers get real-time notifications about which tasks need to be executed.
Repetitive and tedious tasks like submitting documents or filling in forms can also be made less time-consuming by automating them.
Overall this can result in faster results, fewer mistakes, uniformity in processing, and more predictable business outcomes. Moreover, thanks to automation and reduced workload, workers can concentrate on more critical areas of business growth.
Lets you track processes more efficiently
Traditional workflows can be challenging to keep track of. It can be hard to tell if an individual has worked on a file after you’ve sent it to them. You will have to spend (read waste) time to reach out to their department to confirm the progress.
Streamlined workflows, on the other hand, are transparent and much easier to track. Once you make a request, you can easily track its progress at any time.
People overseeing the workflow can collect vital data such as the number of requests initiated, which ones got approved, and the involved expenses.
Better process tracking eliminates complacent employees, missed deadlines, low-quality work, and failure to meet industry guidelines.
Reduces the use of paper
Streamlining processes helps reduce the need to rely on printed hard copies. Automated systems can generate electronic reports that can be shared digitally.
This eliminates the need for paper and can help your business save a significant sum of money on office supplies like paper and ink in the long run. Many companies are now going green, and here’s how you can join them.
Using automatic data entry and processing can also reduce your workforce requirement. Moreover, documents processed digitally are usually far more accurate than manually filled papers.
Allows easy and secure file storage
Digital files are much easier to store and retrieve than hard copies. You can save them to the cloud and pull them remotely from any location at any time.
Electronic files are also easier to catalogue and keep track of. You can tell who created or edited a file and when.
Here are 6 smart ways to share files securely.
Helps identify and eliminate bottlenecks
Companies can operate for many years with undetected bottlenecks. Departments and workers often pass the blame on to each other, which can make pinpointing bottlenecks difficult.
But streamlining your business processes can help you figure out and locate the specific areas that are hindering efficiency.
You can then hold the right people accountable for drawbacks or motivate them to be more productive.
You can also identify redundancies and unnecessary tasks and simply get rid of them to eliminate the bottlenecks.
Prevents replication of roles
Businesses that haven’t streamlined their processes have a high likelihood of having workers interfering in each other’s roles and sometimes overlapping in terms of responsibilities.
This can result in similar processes producing varying outcomes and doubling the workload.
A central streamlined system stops this from happening by providing specific channels of information to all employees, preventing miscommunication and the replication of roles from occurring in the first place.
Helps you perform a better cost-benefit analysis
Business owners have to adapt their way of conducting business according to current market trends. But these changes come at a substantial cost, which is why owners need to be sure of the return on investment and whether adapting a change is worth it.
The same Business Process Management (BPM) software used to automate repetitive tasks can also be used to accurately measure the potential outcome of upgrading certain internal processes.
This allows you to observe the effects of adapting and improving a business process in real-time. The generated reports let you make a better cost-benefit analysis to help you decide whether changing a particular process is worthwhile.
Makes communication more effective
A completely centralised software program connecting the workforce can make communication a lot more easy, accurate, and efficient.
Your workers will no longer have to physically meet the HR or accounts team for small queries. They can simply forward documentation that needs approval to the necessary departments directly through the software.
Streamlined communication, therefore, allows each employee to stay closely connected with one another, saves time, and avoids the hassle of having to move around to pass a message.
Guest post courtesy of Rebecca Lee