Learning how to make business processes more efficient is key to a successful business. Learn the six steps to achieving efficiency.
Several elements contribute to a successful business. One of the most important? Business process efficiency.
A business process is a sequence of steps your company takes to attain a goal. Business process management involves constantly examining and improving business processes.
Business process management is vital for executives who wish to build and scale their corporations.
The business process management market was worth $3.38 billion in 2020. And it could reach $4.78 billion by 2026, a 6.26% CAGR (2021-2026). The figures prove that businesses are putting a premium on business process efficiency.
What is Business Process Efficiency?
Business process efficiency is using Information Technology in an organization to run smooth operations, remove duplication, and reduce costs and friction.
It starts with looking at the processes within an organisation and identifying opportunities to reduce duplication, friction, and processes that don’t add value to the organisation.
You follow dozens of business processes daily.
You may follow specific methods when creating a report, resolving a customer complaint, contacting a new client, or manufacturing a new product.
And you’ve probably seen inefficient processes. Dysfunctional procedures lead to:
- Unhappy customers due to low product quality or poor customer service
- Disgruntled employees
- Missed deadlines due to bottlenecks
- Increased expenditures due to wasted resources
In a nutshell, business process efficiency means improving procedures to provide better results.
Why is Improving Business Process Efficiency Important?
Business process efficiency helps businesses evaluate how much resource is needed to deliver a product. Companies measure process efficiency for numerous purposes, including:
- Budgeting: Understanding production efficiency helps organizations budget for material and labor expenses, tools and machinery, and leftover inventory.
- Revenue forecasting: Estimating profits becomes more accurate if you understand production costs. Businesses subtract overall production costs from each batch’s expected revenue.
- Determining production needs: Some goods require various materials and methods, affecting efficiency and costs. Measuring each production process’s performance allows organisations to focus on each product’s needs.
- Measuring workforce efficiency: Process efficiency informs an organization of human resource efficiency. Knowing how efficient your employees help determine labour needs and create accurate projections.
How Could Information Technology Improve Business Processes?
IT tools allow employees to complete their tasks more efficiently and effectively.
Information Technology has reshaped business organization processes ensuring companies are up to speed and can be more agile and experimental. Agile business processes are part and parcel of reducing time on routine tasks.
1. Measuring employee productivity
Strong IT helps employees accomplish their goals and targets. IT made measuring employee productivity quicker and less challenging.
2. Improving customer service
Customers and clients are a business’s lifeblood. To improve business operations, start with improving customer service.
Technology enhances customer service through innovations that improve how we handle, speak to, provide items, and analyse customer behavior.
Happy clients stay loyal and bring in new ones via word-of-mouth. Hence, organizations must ensure client satisfaction.
Businesses may grow their client bases with a bit of tech support. IT can power chat assistance, dynamic websites, and 24/7 social media customer service.
3. Improving communication
Rapid advancements in communication enabled by the Internet and technologies like laptops and cell phones can be overwhelming. But it’s possible to succeed in business without going through thousands of emails daily.
Once you organize your communication processes, things will go faster and smoother. Your business communications will be more robust with programs that track email opens and other metrics. ISPs will continue to supply more cost-effective solutions, leading to better client communication.
4. Giving way to cloud services and unified communications
Cloud infrastructure has improved communication by unifying messaging tools. Employees and teams in different places can work on a project through online communication tools and cloud services.
Information technology boosts speed and the ability to collaborate, thereby improving productivity.
What Makes a Business Process Efficient?
A business process is efficient if it maximizes inputs or uses resources effectively. If you have yet to think about how to make business processes more efficient, you may be missing opportunities.
An efficient business process boosts revenues and reduces labour and production expenses.
Reducing expenses, increasing output, and boosting profits are proven approaches to outperforming the competition. But these things merely scratch the surface of what makes a firm efficient.
How Do You Make Business Processes More Efficient?
Knowing how to make business processes more efficient is crucial if you aim to succeed and dominate your market.
The key steps to process efficiency are:
- Mapping the steps in your process
- Highlight the areas of friction in the process that don’t add value to the outcome.
- Highlight any data captured more than once
- Add the time required to complete each step. Calculate the total time to complete the process
- Work out how you can reduce/remove the duplication
- Recalculate the time required to complete the process
Improved outcomes might mean:
- Getting results quicker to support agile decision-making.
- Reducing time to fulfill a specific step in a process.
- Reducing duplication.
Good process automation takes data as it comes in and converts it into a usable form across the organization.
Organizations that effectively manage files and digital assets could reduce their operational costs by half. The gained value is a single, trusted, and controlled source for all compliance and corporate records.
Automation will drive efficiency creating room for the growth of the business.
Some examples of efficiencies are:
- Personnel – the automatic generation of organisation charts, training plans, and training matrix, automated reminders for expiring training
- Client/Project – follow up on clients and projects and automatic alerts for project KPIs.
- Assets/Vehicles – Instant notification of prestart faults, reminders for registration renewal, and programmed maintenance, e.g., servicing and calibration.
FocusIMS has evolved to deliver process efficiency for most of the standard processes within a business, especially in compliance and HSEQ.
With a focus on quality, safety, and environmental concerns, we can hold your hand right from using manual systems or semi-automation to full automation.
We have improved processes for companies in diverse fields, from manufacturing to cleaning. Typically an organisation will see a return on the investment of time, hardware and systems costs within just a few months.
The gist of process efficiency is not isolated to the type of industry but to understanding what makes a company run and incorporating these factors in the system.
Try FocusIMS today to experience all the benefits of a cloud-based integrated management system. Give us a call or chat, and we can run through how FocusIMS could fit with your company’s processes.
If you would like to organise a gap analysis for your business, get in contact through:
Email: admin@focusbis.com.au
Phone: 1300 601 008
Messenger Chat: www.focusims.com.au
If you would like to get our cloud-based solution, why not sign up for FocusIMS 2 week Free Trial and start seeing improvements today
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