Have you been noticing poor productivity and decreased revenue in your organisation lately? Maybe, inefficient and unorganised processes are to blame.
Is your business still using Excel and Google sheets? Are you still using printers to print documents on your shop floor, finance department or warehouse? Or you have reached STP (straight thought processing) standard. It’s not the technology of tomorrow, but today! Streamlining business processes can help you reach unimaginable heights. Imagine the world without checkout counters at your grocery store, no queues, no hassle. This is today a reality! Watch the video to learn more…
Businesses implement processes for better governance, higher efficiency, and accelerated productivity, all leading towards being future-ready. However, processes in use become obsolete over time, and your business could take a hit and fall back in line. Fortunately, streamlining business processes isn’t hard to implement with the right set of expertise, strategy, and technology. Here’s how:
What does it mean to streamline?
Streamlining is when unnecessary steps or tasks, complexity, redundancy, or repetitions are removed from business processes to achieve greater efficiency. While the primary purpose is to boost productivity and efficiency, streamlining business processes leads to better governance and improved revenue growth.
How can streamlining business processes improve revenue?
To understand how streamlining helps enhance revenue, you need to know how it benefits your business:
-
Streamlining Business Processes Helps Achieve Cost Efficiency
When you streamline business processes, you can achieve maximum cost efficiency.
For instance, you use a lot of paper and assign employees significant amounts of data to enter or record each day manually. This means you have to purchase paper regularly and allocate your resources to perform redundant tasks which are both labour-intensive and expensive.
However, if you streamline the data entry process by using digital documents and automation instead of physical paper, you won’t have to buy as much paper, which means you can cut costs. Also, as your employees won’t have to perform redundant labour-intensive work each day, they can be assigned more critical tasks.
For example, why not connect directly to your customers and supplier’s ERP solution to eliminate manual order entry and order processing errors. Your business can run 24×7 with seamless integrations without human touch.
How does it help improve revenue?
When you spend less, you have more in profits, and when you digitise or automate, your employees can do more contributing significantly to revenue growth. If you are directly integrated into customers’ and suppliers’ ERP solutions, you could eliminate the entire manual process, improve business agility and speed. Gain more market share with a seamless customer experience.
-
Streamlining Business Processes Helps Improve Productivity
When processes are streamlined, managers have better governance over processes allowing them to tweak or modify them to bring out maximum productivity from their teams. Employees have better direction and more accurately defined KPIs to perform daily tasks assigned to them. They are able to focus on higher quality output compared to when carrying out unnecessary and mundane tasks that require high manual intervention.
How does it help improve revenue?
Delivering more with a higher quality output while using the same or fewer resources translates to better profit as your costs are drastically lowered. This way, you achieve better revenue.
-
Streamlining Business Processes Helps Improve Communication
Communication gaps are one of the biggest reasons for things heading south in any business. Fortunately, streamlining business processes can transform a broken or obsolete path of communication and turn it into a quicker and more accurate way of working within the organisation.
How does it help improve revenue?
Better communication will allow your employees to spend more time on vital tasks rather than moving back and forth just to confirm things. According to a Holmes’ report companies with effective communication experience more productivity, 47% higher returns, and less employee turnover. Better communication also leads to faster time to market and enables you to race past competition.
These are some ways how streamlining business processes can benefit your organisation and leads to better revenue growth. Now for the important question on how you can streamline business processes to achieve their myriad benefits?
How Can You Effectively Streamline Your Business?
Understand the Present Business Processes
No matter how involved you’re in the business, It is difficult to keep a track of processes across the organisation. Bringing tight visibility and governance using a centralised system with analytical insights can help you understand the challenges and obstacles and make the necessary interventions to keep it flowing smoothly again.
Find the Pain Points
Once you know how the processes operate, find:
- What are the communication gaps between your customers and you?
- What processes are your employees finding difficult to deal with and how you can help them solve it?
Pro Tip: Try the Root Cause Analysis to locate the problem and devise an effective solution.
Use Technology and Automate
Automation is the other name for streamlining. By automating redundant processes, you can direct your employees towards more important tasks. This will help your employees save time, deliver more and contribute to better revenue.
For instance, according to Salesforce, process automation is helping employees save 44% time and reduce 26% of the overhead costs, which translates to one thing: more revenue.
Time to Implement
Once you’ve discovered the pain points and issues it’s time to implement the solutions. Carefully integrate the solutions in your organization and offer the necessary training to your employees regarding the same.
Review and Improve
Let the new processes run for a few weeks. Once this time has elapsed, review and determine whether the processes are as effective as they should be. Ask for feedback from your clients and your employees. And based on the feedback, tweak the processes to achieve further efficiency.
Conclusion
Streamlining business processes can seem quite cumbersome at the beginning. But is completely worth it. Thousands of companies are streamlining their business processes and achieving better productivity, efficiency, reduced costs, and better revenue growth.
However, make sure to get in touch with a reliable business consultant who’d help you make the cumbersome process pretty easy and manageable. Professional business consultants know how to deal with complex data, locate problems and automate the processes to help you achieve good results. Your customers are pivoting to simplified faster delivery services, what are you doing to meet their demands?