What’s Process Optimization? Why Is It So Important for Your Business?
Process optimization is the discipline of continuously adapting processes to improve them. To do this, you have to conduct an analysis to identify weaknesses and find solutions to overcome them.
A business’s efficiency depends on its processes. This is why optimization is essential to achieve the desired competitiveness and make it a benchmark in the market against which others are compared. Do you want to learn more about what process optimization is? Keep on reading and we’ll explain it all.
Process Optimization is the field of adapting processes to perfect their features, while staying within their limits. Generally, the objective is to minimize costs and maximize performance, productivity, and efficiency.
The goal of business process optimization is to increase efficiency by improving processes through better resource use. This practice is part of BPM, also known as business process management.
As a result, process optimization can create strategies to improve workflows, enhance communication, predict changes, and eliminate redundancies. Generally speaking, managing and optimizing processes is critical for digital transformation in all companies.
Without a doubt, business process optimization makes a company more competitive over time. You’ll see some of its benefits below.
Mapping activities makes it easier to standardize processes and formalize them. This reduces mistakes, repetition, and questions regarding procedures, which notably reduces risks.
When processes are optimized, waste can be easily identified, which makes it possible to find errors, poorly used resources, bottlenecks that compromise productivity, and so on. This in turn helps resolve these issues and reduce expenses.
Improved internal and external processes are one of the greatest benefits, since the chances are improved of delivering the quality that customers seek in a product or service provider. This is a way to achieve a prominent market position and offer greater value.
Business process optimization allows products and services to be delivered *with agility and quality *, because with mistakes corrected and processes standardized, you can produce more in less time, and with more quality.
Tasks that don’t add value can be eliminated without any negative consequences. This maximizes time and creates more agile workflows.
You get a better general view over all processes, which aids integration and optimization of the business as a whole.
With an end-to-end view, you can identify the causes of problems. This helps to fix mistakes at their source, so managers don’t need to invest resources in mitigating consequences instead of actually resolving issues.
It’s easier to stay compliant with standardized and monitored processes. Plus, in the event of an audit, transparency in processes eases the proceedings and contributes to the desired results.
Based on these benefits, make sure you always pay attention to symptoms of poor process management in your company.
If you're still unsure whether you need to implement any improvement strategies, below, we've listed the main symptoms related to the lack of process optimization in companies.
It's always problematic to locate data in systems, and some data may not even be collected.
Customers are dissatisfied due to the quality of services and products.
Deliveries always suffer from delays because there is no standard for deadlines.
Variations in the service or final product constantly occur.
Leaders always struggle to delegate tasks.
There is a great difficulty in planning goals and measuring results.
Learn more about process standardization on our blog.
Process optimization can be done through different methodologies. But, below, you'll find six important stages for this type of work.
Before starting to implement changes, it's necessary to define the goal to be achieved. Is the idea to review processes that occur throughout the entire company or to adjust bottlenecks in a specific area?
Improving a specific process is a simpler task, while a complete review is more labor-intensive and has a greater impact.
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Mapping processes is perhaps the most important part of process optimization.
At this point, it is necessary to do the AS IS mapping, which is the name given to the survey of activities that are currently performed within the company and how they are carried out.
The main goal is to understand where the company stands so that it is possible to identify the necessary improvements.
With the processes already mapped, the company is able to identify steps that can be dispensed with in order to optimize processes.
One example is tasks performed manually but could be done digitally in a completely automated way.
Unproductive tasks or tasks that generate unnecessary expenses for the company should also be identified and eliminated.
After considering the dispensable and redundant processes, it is necessary to focus on those that need to be kept and reflect on their improvement. For this, it is necessary to rethink how they are done.
Therefore, it is necessary to understand if there is a better way to carry out the process or if it is being conducted correctly. What errors can occur during the execution of this process, and how can they be avoided? What points in this process can halt production?
Answering these questions with an understanding of their impact on both the process itself and the company as a whole is essential to improve the company's results.
To ensure that approved processes are implemented without errors and continuously, investment in automation is necessary.
The automation of processes aims to facilitate even more the management of company processes and ensure that form control, deadlines, and data collection are centralized, further saving time and waste.
The process of process automation is cyclical and requires constant attention. Therefore, even after completing all the previous steps, always make sure to monitor.
Even if everything has gone as planned, new problems, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities can always arise.
All parts of a business can benefit from process optimization. If you want to know what it’s good for, below are some practical examples.
Technology and process optimization can definitely determine the efficiency of an HR department. When a new employee joins a company, there’s a sequence of steps that are manually completed.
So when we update this process, it can be accelerated by activating triggers that automate some actions, eliminating mistakes, and speeding up the onboarding process.
Process optimization in a sales team helps salespeople to understand customers’ status, which makes their path to conversion easier, as well as cross-selling and upselling.
Moreover, it contributes to team organization, providing defined, internal, client-centered tasks. It also makes it easier to see problems in the sales process and, consequently, their solutions.
In marketing, process optimization allows you to improve content management in social media, blogs, and websites, since you streamline production, revision, and publishing content flows. It also makes tracking department metrics easier and aids in lead and customer management.
Keeping track of due dates is an advantage of process optimization in finance because it permits greater account oversight and task tracking. Moreover, it also contributes to data-based decision-making and provides greater visibility to operations.
To optimize your business processes, you should follow the steps below:
The first step is to map your processes in order to identify areas of improvement and establish objectives and goals. It’s important to have an overview of your business so you can see how processes might be integrated.
When you identify what needs improvement, you should analyze how you can optimize it given the available resources. It’s essential to learn the different ways each process can occur with more agility and fewer resources with the help of technology.
After redesigning everything needing it, it’s time to implement and automate repeated tasks. This is the way you maximize the efficiency of each process you identified.
Learn more about process automation, an important point in the optimization phase.
When you have finished the changes, you need to monitor optimized processes to make the necessary changes until you obtain your desired results. To do this, there are tools that can constantly monitor individual processes as well as operations as a whole.
Process optimization should be continuous and you should always pay attention to new possibilities for improvement, for this is the only way to keep your business competitive.
Simultaneously, employees need to understand that process optimization aims to make their work easier and the company more productive.
By using resources to their fullest, process optimization undeniably increases business efficiency and offers more value to clients.
Because of this, technological platforms help transform your business processes, just as integrated process management can improve or even revolutionize your business.
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