You’ve heard about process improvement in your office. You know there are tools for process improvement that help you improve the way you handle your daily work. But what are the actual tangible benefits you stand to gain in your office by doing these improvements? Or is it all just cleverly marketed snake oil?
Benefits of Business Process Improvement:
Here are the benefits of the business process improvement that can help you to improve your business.
Improved Productivity
The problem with manual systems and workflows is that they’re incredibly time consuming. Having process improvements to automate these can help you and your staff save a lot of time and effort. You won’t have to spend time doing things like data transfers, email communication, and filling out forms manually, and you can spend the time you’ve saved doing things that actually bring in revenue and new customers.
For example, if you’re managing an e-commerce store, adding new items to your store is an incredibly daunting task. It’s a waste of your time to sit and manually key in every item. But even if you outsource this work or hire someone to do it, you still need to approve each item before it goes live to make sure it matches your requirements.
Another thing that takes up a lot of time is paying vendors for their products and services. With a vendor payment app like what you’d find in kissflow, you can have that entirely automated, and thereby freeing up your time and the finance department’s.
With process improvement and automation, you can save valuable time by reducing the number of steps a person needs to do, and streamlining all the approvals. That gives you time to find new vendors, secure new supply channels, improve customer service, and work on other improvements that can directly increase the revenue of your company.
Happier Employees
When you think about what motivates your employees, the drudgery of doing the same routine tasks every day probably doesn’t top the list. Motivated and satisfied employees are usually the ones that are at the front lines, constantly looking for new things to do ways to help the organization grow. That kind of growth, and the feeling of having made a change, is what gives an employee satisfaction.
Instead of having to tediously do routine and mind-numbing tasks, and thereby wearing them out, your employees can know that they are making a direct impact in the workplace, and also added value to their careers. That is what directly leads to employee satisfaction.
Satisfied Customers
You’d love to send every customer a personalized thank you note and follow up on any experience they’ve had. You’d love to have every interaction that a customer has with you feel like they’ve been given speciality treatment.
This is nearly impossible to do if you think in terms of manual processes. However, when you apply automation, you can give the same amazing experience to everyone. You can use trigger events like purchases, webinar attendance, or visiting a particular page on your website to initiate a new workflow.
When customers experience a high level of consistency and accuracy, they build trust with your company and know that they won’t get dropped through the cracks. That positive experience will give your customers the motivation to recommend your company and products to their friends and family. That kind of word-of-mouth marketing is not something that can easily be bought but has incredible levels of influence among potential buyers.
Reduced Risk
The problem with doing things manually is that humans are prone to error. Whether you’re adding in thousands of products or filling out invoices, humans can make mistakes when doing data entry, making calculations, and transferring information from one system to another. That’s something that is unavoidable, regardless of how robust your system may be.
With proper process automations and improvements in place, you can avoid these kinds of problems. You can have a system take care of the things that humans often struggle with, without leaving anything up to chance.
Process improvements help you find out which areas of your business you can automate, and reduce manual time that you and your employees spend. Here’s how business process improvement can solve your business problems.
Conclusion
When a company starts out, it can be easy to brush off business process improvement and automation as something that can be done at a later time, when the business is growing. But that’s a mistake that you don’t want to make. Process improvements are what help a business grow, and if you haven’t implemented automation for some of your menial and laborious tasks yet, you’re wasting your and your employee’s time. There’s a whole market of process improvement tools, like Kissflow Process, that can do a world of good for your business. Try it out and see if it’s right for you!
