In a competitive market, there is only one way for a company to stay afloat: you must continuously improve. That means taking a critical look at how work is done in your organization and which business processes can be improved. When taking measures to improve processes, Return On Investment should always be the starting point. What costs will the change involve (e.g. in employee time, extra facilities, external help or new automation) and what benefits will it bring (e.g. in profit, turnover, time savings, efficiency, convenience or higher service level)?
Wrong motives for changing processes
Changes in organizations too often result from the wrong motives. Not ROI, but e.g.:
- Cost savings: while less cost is good, one must also consider the consequences; if you lose many customers because of the cost-saving measure, it may be unwise.
- Limited by automation: the impossibilities and limitation of your software should not be the reason to change processes to the detriment of the business.
- Influence of one or a few employees: the employees with the highest word or who are too stubborn to follow the rules ever manage to get their way regarding how work is done, while the organization does not benefit.
- Short-term benefit: policy is too often based on quick profits and short-term gain, when the long-term success of your business is far more important.
Optimizing processes; how do you do it?
Make sure you have clearly documented how your business processes run. Look critically at where improvement can be made. How can the process be faster? Are there steps I can skip? Are there manual actions I can automate? For example, look at issuing quotes. Ideally, with the push of a button, you would instantly present a beautiful customized quote to your customer. That may be a pipe dream, but at many companies the process of preparing and issuing a quotation can be faster and better. Adjusting the process rarely costs you anything, the time saved saves money and your customers are more satisfied.
Learn from best practices
Optimizing processes is not easy. Sometimes it is simply too difficult to identify how and where improvement can be made. But your organization is not unique. Your competition struggles with the same challenges, and you can learn a lot from them. How do they arrange the processes? Is it done faster or better than yours? Look at the best practices in your industry and take advantage of them. This does not mean blindly adopting what the competition does. Translate the best practices into a way of working that suits your company.
Focus on what really matters
You don't have the time to optimize everything in the organization. You will have to pay careful attention to what really matters. It makes no sense to concern yourself with the one process that happens twice a year. Focus on the day-to-day processes, the processes that really make a difference for your customers. And don't stop at talking about processes and putting things on paper. It has to be implemented. That means instructing people, adjusting facilities, taking charge and monitoring that the changes are implemented properly.
ROI is not always easy to calculate
It is not always easy to calculate the ROI of a process change. The total costs are not always clear and for the (expected) revenues it is even more difficult to express in figures. Still, you should try. Because decisions based on ROI are better for your business than decisions based on gut feeling, on good luck, or to keep doing what you are used to.
Teun Arts is Service Manager at Dysel and ensures that customers make optimal use of the software's capabilities, now and in the future.
