There’s not a company on the planet that doesn’t want to improve its processes. Whether an operation spends the day putting out fires or turns to an internal productivity system, a company can always operate more efficiently.
However, the issue many organizations grapple with isn’t finding the motivation to improve upon processes, but instead deciding their approach.
Here are three ways to approach improving your company’s processes.
Keeping Up with Dynamic Market Forces
All business processes should find ways to be more risk averse. No matter the department or initiative, quality control is integral to the livelihood of companies. One of the ways to tackle potential risk is to understand dynamic market forces including tariffs, changing markets, customers and the like. By addressing these concerns proactive, your organization can avoid costly pitfalls.
Streamlining Internal Operations
Organizations of all sizes depend on several departments operating at cost-effective margins. Achieving this feat isn’t easy, though. Streamlining various workflows is difficult because so many people are involved. Each team or department is also adamant about sticking with the processes they’ve been using.
Business processes don’t need to be uniform among departments to be efficient. They just need to replicate each other in that they cut out the fluff.
When vetting the efficiency of each department’s processes, consider how much the employees involved cost. After all, every employee can make a difference, but not all salaries are created equal. If a department’s processes eat up too much of your high-salaried employees’ time, a process needs to be designed to free up bandwidth.
A good example is of this is traditional business intelligence reporting, which involves employees submitting report requests to data teams and waiting days to weeks for answers depending on the complexity of the question. Considering data analysts and scientists demand some of the highest salaries in a company, this wasn’t an efficient use of their time. The advent of modern BI reporting through software like ThoughtSpot relieves data professionals of the tedium via user-friendly features like ad-hoc querying, automatic data visualizations, and simplified sharing. This lets the data team focus on initiatives that benefit the organization over the long-term, improving a company’s bottom line in the process.
Improve Customer Experience
Acquiring new customers is integral to the growth of any business, but acquisition means little if those customers can’t be turned into lifetime advocates. Of course, this is easier said than done in a consumer-driven omnichannel world.
It’s easy to think of the customer experience as strictly sales and marketing responsibilities. These departments may focus on generating leads and turning them into customers, but every part of a company impacts how consumers feel about doing business with an organization. Implement processes across departments that focus on customer-centric metrics so that you’re continually optimizing every touchpoint and stage of the buying journey.
To evaluate business performance based on hard data, employees need easy access to insights. Business intelligence and analytic solutions allow for seamless knowledge discovery, enabling any type of user to drill down into data. The level of granularity matched identify areas for improvement and make better decisions.
Improving business processes isn’t a matter of going through the motions. Try to do so, and you’ll get burned. For organizations serious about enacting processes that benefit the business over the short and long-term, keep these three approaches in mind. It’ll take buy-in from all. Probably the assistance of a BI or data analytics tool. But by affixing your gaze on these three approaches, you can get there.
