How to optimize internal business processes
Published 26/11/2021
Published 26/11/2021
Internal business processes often cost a lot of time and money, as it is the efficiency of industrial processes that determines how much time and money is needed on all levels of a company, from manufacturing to business management. Thus optimizing internal business processes has a direct impact on the performance and financial success of companies.
No matter what, processes should always function at their peak efficiency. Efficiency has a direct impact on the productivity of employees who use these processes. Think about it. What happens if an employee has a faulty device and it takes two days for the IT team to respond?
The employee is forced not to work the entire time. Companies that have been around for a while don’t have the liberty to scrape off everything and rebuild their processes from scratch. These companies nail down detailed processes the first time and continue to use them for a long time. The easiest and best option is to optimize processes constantly.
What is process optimization?
Process optimization is the discipline of adjusting a process to optimize a specified set of parameters without violating a few constraints. The most common goals are minimizing cost and maximizing throughput and/or efficiency. This is one of the major quantitative tools in industrial decision-making.
What is business process optimization?
Business process optimization is the practice of increasing organizational efficiency by improving processes. It’s a part of the discipline of business process management (BPM). Optimized processes lead to optimized business goals.
Some examples of optimization include:
- Eliminating redundancies
- Streamlining workflows
- Improving communication
- Forecasting changes
The rewards of optimizing business processes
Your organization is in constant competition and faces threats from other companies, disruptive technologies, and changing norms. Optimizing business processes offers many benefits that can help businesses stay afloat in the tidal waves of change such as:
- Market compliance
- Streamlined operations
- Reduced risks
- Well-utilized resources
- Consistency
- Assured quality
- End-to-end visibility
Business process optimization can be the secret to navigating the rough seas of the industry.
Steps to implement business process optimization
Planning is essential to make the most out of your business process optimization effort. Here’s a brief step-by-step guide to help you carry out a process optimization plan.
Step 1: Identify
Pick a problematic process you want to optimize. Define the purpose and goals.
Step 2: Analyze
Is the process meeting desired goals? Is there excess wastage you need to cut down on?
Step 3: Implement
Once you get rid of unnecessary elements, automate the revised process in its new form.
Step 4: Monitor
Take a micro and macro look at process performance and fine-tune it until you get desired results.
What does business process optimization look like in the real world?
Because optimizing business processes is one of the steps in the wider application of BPM, it often gets mixed up with other concepts like business process improvement or business process automation. Here are a few real-life examples of how business process optimization can increase efficiency.
Purchase orders
Multiple purchase orders clog the queue of the purchasing department. The department senses this problem is due to email approvals. To streamline requests, the department deploys a dedicated workflow management system. The workflow system lets employees choose the item and send it for approvals automatically.
Travel reimbursement
The finance department makes frequent errors when reimbursing expenses. Since the entire process is paper-based, they misread numbers and reimburse the wrong amount to employees. To fix this, the department moved to a digital system where employees fill the amount in form fields. There are no processing errors this way.
Employee onboarding
Onboarding a new employee happens in a sequence of steps. The HR executives send the employee agreement over email. After the employee signs it, the next step to provision assets in IT should proceed. But each time the HR manually sends a mail to IT to provision laptops and grant access to tools. To make the process faster, an email trigger is set up. Once the employee signs and sends the employee agreement, an email is automatically sent to IT.
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Connect 2 BPO S.A.S is a Business Process Outsourcing company established in 2016. We develop, execute and manage campaigns for businesses around the world.