What are business processes?
Business processes are the system of consistent, stable and regulated business activities in which process entries are being transformed into exits – results of the process by means of management actions and with the help of resources.
When it’s the time to optimize?
Till some certain level of development, some companies can manage without regulated system of activities. It is quite difficult to give a correct answer to the question, when it is the time to start business process optimization. However, there are some factors which can indicate the necessity of it. They are:
- Number of personnel growth;
- Number of levels of management growth;
- Number of divisions and departments growth;
- Territorial disunity of divisions and departments;
- Absence or imperfection of single information system.
So, if at some certain stage of company development you have found that:
- Decisions of the company are made extremely slowly;
- Decisions of the company are being implemented slowly and not properly;
- Some certain aspects of company functioning are not under someone’s control;
- There’s a psychological suppression among personnel due to the lack of regulations of rights, duties, responsibilities;
- Fulfilling of common working tasks takes a lot of time, powers, phone calls, approvals, administrative notes,
then it makes sense to provide business process optimization. It is important to notice that sometimes you don’t have to wait for some certain symptoms of its necessity. For example, if management structure of the company has been reorganized or a new informational system has been implemented, there is a necessity of immediate business process optimization.
There are some key aspects of practical realization of business process optimization described below.
Choosing of a graphical description tool
Honestly, choosing of business process description software is not that meaningful as it is believed. It has its own sense only if the description is provided with the aim of further business processes implementation into the informational system of the company.
Also you should take into consideration the fact that business processes are needed not for implementation engineers but for employees themselves. That is why a graphical description tool should be easily accessible for participants at the stages of approving and optimization as well as at the stages of implementation and modernization.
Business process optimization
Something can be optimized according to some certain aspects. A business process can be optimized according to costs, duration, the number of transactions, etc. Such criteria are of external nature towards a business process.
This means that criteria of business process optimization are determined by the higher level of management system – the strategy and positioning.
To sum it up, business process system is a perfect tool for business effectiveness improvement on the procedure level. That is why such an approach is widely used in business nowadays.