What is an Internal Process and How to Improve it?

Internal processes operate like a well-oiled machine, coordinating interactions between people, teams, and systems. For CIOs and BTPs, enhancing these processes is not just an objective—it's a strategic necessity.
This blog dives into the importance of internal processes, their role in boosting productivity and pleasing customers, and how to improve them. This resource gives technology leaders the understanding and insights to navigate and optimize these complex processes, ensuring their organizations thrive in the digital era.

What is an Internal Process?

Internal processes are defined as business processes that are performed within an organization without the involvement of any external partners. They are a part of the balanced scorecard method, a metric used to evaluate an organization's performance.
An internal process also refers to the series of steps or actions that team members must perform in the daily execution of their organizational duties. This can range from simple ones, such as managing a purchase order, to more complex ones, like following federal insurance regulations. 
 
Whether complex or simple, improving a company's internal process is essential. An organization has to invest in strategies that make processes faster, cheaper, and more effective to improve performance and satisfy the needs of customers. An internal process is defined as a process that can be executed within an organization without involving external parties. Several processes fit these criteria within every organization.

Examples of internal processes include

Operation Management Processes

These are the daily steps or actions an organization needs to take to create its product or deliver its services to customers. For instance, if you run an e-commerce business, operation management processes are those processes that involve receiving and fulfilling customer orders.

Customer Management Processes

Every business involves relating with customers one way or another. Customer management processes are a series of actions aimed at developing a relationship with the customer. Examples of processes that fall into this category include customer acquisition, collecting and managing customer feedback, customer retention, and customer communication, to name a few. These processes can be greatly enhanced with tools like customer communication management software, which streamline interactions, personalize messaging, and ensure consistent engagement across multiple channels.

Innovation Processes

These are processes aimed at helping an organization reach new markets. This can be done by creating alternative products or introducing a new line of services. An internal business process example like this is the creation of a new line of products or expansion into new markets.

Regulatory Processes

These processes are vital to an organization's compliance with regulatory standards needed to retain its license to operate. Examples may include processes to maintain environmental compliance, health and safety regulations, and social responsibility.

How to Improve My Internal Process

Every organization looking to grow and stay competitive must constantly improve its internal process.

The following are some strategies that can help improve your internal process.

Step 1: Free up mission-critical information

To improve your business process, one of the critical things you must do is extract vital information from silos and make them accessible to all. Data is crucial to the day-to-day operation of every organization. Without it, your team will fly blindly in most of their operations. Freeing up data for everyone involved will provide plenty of insights to stakeholders, help identify gaps and clear bottlenecks in service delivery.

Step 2: Improve employee training

The efficiency of your internal processes rests almost entirely on your team. Most tasks and processes within an organization are repeatable. But if those in charge do not clearly understand their role, it will be challenging to deliver efficiently. Repeatable processes will be improved significantly if you invest in the onboarding and training of employees.

Step 3: Improve employee visibility

In most organizations, employees simply do their work without clearly understanding how they fit into the big picture. However, you stand a better chance of improving productivity when employees understand the objectives of their tasks and their roles' overall impact on internal processes. This will inspire creativity and help them develop new ways to achieve business objectives effectively.

Step 4: Automate processes

"Any task that has a systematic process flow and is performed in numerous iterations daily has the biggest opportunity for process automation. Whereas tasks that involve a lot of bookkeeping and documentation should be the first targets for digital transformation to get rid of manual storage and workload and so that you can document, index and access all data digitally".
 - Raghavkumar Parmar, MMA Pan Asia Fund Management

Certain aspects of an organization's internal processes can be set on auto-pilot. This mainly applies to repeatable tasks that require little to no human intervention. Automating these processes will allow employees to focus on more germane tasks. Process automation also promotes efficiency and better performance in the long run. Inside businesses, automating processes can yield transformative benefits; for instance, automating customer service tasks with chatbots is a cornerstone of conversational commerce, facilitating seamless interactions and improving customer satisfaction. Leveraging direct communication channels such as social messaging and SMS not only enhances efficiency but also provides valuable data insights that can be utilized to refine business strategies further.

Step 5: Put yourself in your customers' shoes

Perhaps the best way to understand how to optimize internal processes is to examine things from the customer's perspective. When you examine your internal processes from your customer's point of view, you will be able to notice missing or inefficient steps and implement strategies to optimize them.

Benefits of Improving Your Internal Processes

There are numerous benefits to improving your internal process. When you evaluate your internal processes to determine how to improve them, you'll gain valuable insights into how your organization delivers value. This is necessary to meet customer expectations.

Other benefits of improving internal processes include:

• Elevates your service delivery
• Maximizes resources
• Delivers value to your customers in the most efficient way possible.

Conclusion

Kissflow's process management platform is a robust tool that simplifies the creation, management, and optimization of internal processes. It provides many common process examples like vacation requests, purchase requests, and employee onboarding, which make it easier for businesses to streamline their operations.

The workflow platform is user-friendly and does not require coding skills, allowing even complex processes to be easily built. It has a well-structured layout with tabs for feed, items, and tasks, enabling efficient management of processes.
Kissflow also offers process templates, which can be customized to suit individual business needs. It supports the creation of process workflows showing the ideal data path and accommodating alternate conditions and flows.

Additionally, Kissflow provides features for process administration, including process member management, permissions, settings, and audit logs.