Running a business is not easy and entrepreneurs understand this struggle much better than anyone else. There are different processes being executed every day and, if they are not planned out properly, it could lead to wasted resources like time, money, labor, etc.
Most companies are well aware that business processes play an important part to their competitive success, as it forms a safety net, and will streamline these processes to ensure that they are put to its most optimal use.
However, with the ever-changing technologies and competition, how can you be assured that your business is running at its maximum efficiency with your business process fully optimized?
The idea of business process optimization is to make your processes more efficient and to give your company that competitive edge.
It is not as simple as buying the latest software and hoping that it will magically optimize your business processes for you. It still requires you to analyze your organization’s operations with a critical mindset and, if done right, an optimized business process can attract new customers, retain existing customers and reduce expenses.
Take a long look at your business process map and identify processes that are causing your business to generate wastage. They can be tackled with 3Rs: Revise, Remove or Replace.
What are some processes that can be improved? Are they using up a big part of your resources?
One example will be the approval process in a company: In order to receive a project approval, there are many layers of organizational structure the approval has to go through. This wastes time and there are better processes to counter the issue. One solution could be to restructure your process to receiving consent from only 2 management level staff. You save time and essentially money.
If processes are found to be necessary but inefficient, revise them either by reorganizing the process, eliminating ineffective procedures, or doing both.
Every process in your business process map should be a value added to your output. If you examine your map and realized that some processes are irrelevant, but you are safekeeping them for “unexpected” situations, remove them completely. By safekeeping these procedures, you are exhausting time and manpower to execute them and these resources can be used on more efficient and profitable processes.
Let’s be honest, nobody likes labor intensive and time consuming manual work. If you feel that you and your employees are doing something that can be replaced by automation, substitute that process with a reliable software.
According to a study by Redwood Software and Sapio Research, nearly 60% of business processes can be automated by 2022 and it is predicted that automation can cut operating costs up to 90%.
By adopting technology and software for your business processes, you can remove tedious labour from your employees’ workloads, resulting in higher productivity and efficiency.
Here are some processes that can be replaced with automation:
The conventional way of managing social media marketing is to design collaterals and have someone to log into the social media accounts to post them. These are additional processes that can be avoided with a software like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can now pre-plan your posts, schedule them accordingly on various platforms and have the software publish these posts for you according to the schedule you have created.
There are many small tasks involved when completing a sale to ensure that everything is functioning properly. With so many ancillary yet vital chores on hand, CRM has become a very time-consuming aspect of the sales process. A strong CRM software like Salesforce can help to take the burden of such tasks off the shoulders of your employees, while providing vital data for your management level to make decisions with.
After you have fine-tuned your business process map, test it out and observe the changes. Is the newly implemented map more effective and efficient than your previous one? If it is, then you are on the right track. If it is not improving your business, adjust different aspects of the process until you are satisfied with the results achieved.
Your ultimate goal of optimizing your business process is to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Although complicated, this optimization is definitely justifiable as it adds value to the stakeholders of the company in the long run.
Looking at improving your business process with more marketing automation, insights in sales progression and data from various touch points? Send over an enquiry to us for a non-obligation free demo of the strongest CRM platform in Salesforce today!
