6 stages of business process optimization
A quality business process management is able to provide significant advantages for any team or a company. However, in order to achieve them, it is necessary to use a systematic approach to business process optimization. Specialists recommend using of a six-step scheme in management of relatively complicated business processes:
- Choose a business process which you are going to improve, define objectives and the scales of changes, and gather a team.
- Study the business process which is going to be improved in details.
- Decide what changes are going to be made in the business process.
- Resources involvement. Provide the existence of personnel, equipment and other resources necessary for providing of the changes planned.
- Make necessary changes.
- Constant development. Assess effectiveness of the business process which have been changed regularly and make extra changes if needed.
Of course, if you are going just to make small changes in some insignificant business processes, there is no need in scrupulous following of all these steps. It is quite enough just to think over them quickly.
Planning of business process optimization
To make a plan of business process changing it is necessary to make the following steps:
- To define the problem
- To choose a process which is necessary to improve
- To define the scales, purposes and the schedule of changes
- To gather a team which will be working on business process optimization
- To set a task to the team appropriately
Discovering of problem factors
To make a plan of business process optimization it is necessary to decide if it is really important to improve a business process. The answer to this question will be positive if you observe some specific symptoms including the following:
- Customers say that the quality of your services or products is getting worse
- Some procedures seem to be too complicated
- Fulfillment of some tasks takes more time than it used to be or different people spend different amount of time on the same tasks
- Correct fulfillment of a task from the first time is not frequent
- The quality of work of your team is getting lower or it happens that it is impossible for your team to fulfill a certain task
- Employees complain about complicated activity management and difficulties interfering them to fulfill their duties
Choosing of a process which is necessary to be improved
It is quite possible that you, as most managers, observe several symptoms of the problems at the same time. It lets you think that it will be better for your company to optimize several business processes at once.
When you think that you need to improve several business processes at once, how to decide, which of them is to be optimized primarily? Make list of criteria according to which you will find out what business process should be improved first.
Business process optimization is a very complicated process which can take a significant amount of time. However, having made the assessment of your business processes you will be aware about everything what is going on in your company, what weak points of your business don’t allow you to achieve set goals and what you can do to improve them.