Understanding and optimizing business processes can be a game-changer for any company. Business Process Design (BPD) defines the framework, which includes three pivotal categories: Operational Processes, Supporting Processes, and Management Processes, that keep the operations running smoothly.
Streamlining these processes offers incredible advantages and improves your business’s efficiency by eliminating bottlenecks, removing redundant tasks, and identifying areas ripe for automation. Let’s look at how.
Understanding Types of Business Processes
Business Process Design or BPD involves developing or creating your business workflow, where a workflow or process is a sequence of repeated steps your team or individuals must take to ensure improved business operations, increased productivity, and goal achievement. Business processes are classified in three ways:
- Operational Processes
Operational processes include procedures and tasks that affect output production and are part of the ‘value’ chain of the business. It is related to the values, mission, and business and is your company’s primary revenue source. These include:
- Creating or developing a product or service
- Marketing of your product and service
- Customer service and support both pre and post-sale
- Supporting Processes
These are also called secondary processes; while they do not generate income, they help in smoothing operations. For example, having cleaning staff doesn’t bring money, but employees aren’t motivated to perform in an unclean environment.
- Management Processes
Management processes help coordinate the other processes by planning, monitoring, and overseeing to ensure teams meet targets, the workplace is safe and compliant, and threats are adequately identified and dealt with. They optimize income opportunities.
Why You Should Streamline Your Company’s Business Operations
Understanding business processes allows you to quickly locate and remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies, which increases process efficiency. It helps you remove activities from the process that do not generate value.
Having a ‘template’ for regularly occurring processes reduces error, standardizes procedures, and identifies tasks that would benefit the most from automation. Finally, it ensures your activities align with business goals and that you utilize your resources optimally.
Streamlining simplifies your business processes, while automation uses applications or tools to perform recurring tasks. Streamlining business processes helps you save time and cost and increases efficiency as employees understand their roles better. It improves productivity because there are no unnecessary tasks and enhances communication by improving the flow of information.
Automation improves time management skills by freeing employees to pursue other duties and responsibilities. It also enables you to monitor and analyze company results, such as what needs improving or where errors crop up.
Key Strategies to Employ
Now that you know the different business processes and the importance of streamlining them, let’s see how exactly you can automate or streamline business operations.
- Business Automation Consultant
Business automation specialists streamline and optimize your business process using automated solutions and technology to reduce manual work, improve productivity, and enhance efficiency. They can determine the strengths and weaknesses of your existing systems and what changes you need to implement or create custom solutions that meet your specific business requirements. Certain functions they perform include:
- Conducting audits of your existing processes
- Automate your lead generation system
- Automating cold email inbox management
- Finding automation opportunities within the computer software products
- Install applications or databases for automation
- Write codes to automate particular processes
- Test performance of the operating system
- Conduct QA/QC (quality assurance and quality control) and oversee concept implementation to help with marketing campaigns
- Increase your company revenue
- Save time
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM is a tool that keeps track of your leads, delivers quality customer service, and streamlines your sales process. A few ways CRM streamlines your sales process include
- It automates repetitive tasks, such as emails, to reduce non-selling activities. You can auto-assign leads to representatives and send reminders, tips, and personalized emails to prospects and customers.
- Streamlines marketing-to-sales handoff by automatically alerting your sales team when the marketing team decides a lead is ready to move up the sales and identifying where the lead is in the buying process.
- It increases prospect visibility in the sales funnel by organizing priority leads and seeing who created what lead and when.
- It helps you generate a sales report that helps you interpret your sales team’s success.
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Enterprise content management allows businesses to obtain, store, organize, and deliver vital information to stakeholders, customers, and employees. Traditional ECM content included paper documents, such as resumes, contracts, and invoices, but now it has social media posts, web content, audio files, and more. It can handle:
- Structured content: Contained and defined data such as code repositories and database
- Unstructured content: Information without a predefined format, such as emails, PDFs, and Office documents.
You can use ECM in the following areas:
- Contracts management: Digitally collaborate and review, edit, and approve contracts.
- Accounts receivable automation: This accelerates customer payment speed and reduces the time of DSO (days sales outstanding)
- Accounts payable automation: This accurately distributes, matches, and approves invoices, delivery tickets, and purchase orders
- HR automation: This removes the need for paper-based employee files.
- Project Management Software
There are different types of project management software, such as
- Individual project management software for small teams of up to five employees
- Collaborative project management software for large groups that have low-tech needs for their projects
- Integrated project management software for businesses with different teams for projects large project portfolios, as it provides a decentralized information database, workflow access based on requirements, and digital assets.
Such software and applications streamline and automate business processes by:
- Providing centralized platforms for team communication
- Efficiently assigning tasks to team members
- Sending automatic reminders
- Centralized storage and sharing of documents
Endnote
From the expertise of business automation consultants to the prowess of CRM and ECM tools, you now have multiple options to help you streamline your business’s workflow. Embracing these strategies doesn’t just boost efficiency; it redefines how businesses function, fostering growth, agility, and resource optimization.
Also read: Customizing Automated Workflows For Unique Business Needs
