How to Improve business efficiency

How to Improve business efficiency - News featured image

Introduction

All organisations have a business process and a workflow. In some situations, these workflows evolve. They can also depend on how individuals in the organisation decide how to do something internally.

Workflows tend to be set up as individual ventures and are the internal standard operating procedure. Therefore these workflows are created in isolation from the rest of the business.

It is common to see workflows that combine complex Excel spreadsheets, emails, accounting systems, stored files, paper documents, and even post-it notes.

An issue for a business is these inefficient ways of operating become critical to the company, and changing them seems too daunting.

Having a clear roadmap to replace these inefficient workflows with milestones allows a business to have the confidence to progress the change and make significant bottom-line improvements.

We describe below a simple and effective milestone plan to achieve these improvements.

Assess and evaluate the current situation

The starting milestone is to understand what the current processes are doing. What are the final desired outcomes, and what are the inputs to the current process.

What work is performed by the teams during the current workflow steps?

It’s good to get the existing team involved with this stage. Ask for feedback, examine what tasks are done and look for what is not working well.

What steps are repeating, and what steps are the bottleneck and slowing everything down. 

It is then possible to identify areas for improvement and potential workflow gaps. A SWOT analysis is beneficial to show the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Decide on priorities

When the current workflows are understood, we can rank the processes in terms of priority for perhaps daily, weekly and monthly workflows. This ranking allows us to know what areas require attention for change so the change will have the optimum improvement.

Create effective workflows

The ideal aim here is to do as much work with the least effort and the fewest steps. Factors related to effective workflows are:

  • Focus only on what is important
  • Make information sharing very easy
  • Speed up workflows
  • Set a process to measure performance and make improvements.

We can create a document that describes what the new workflow should be.

Leverage automation

The next milestone is to assess how your team can use automation to reduce the amount of time each team member spends on the tasks that are most critical to your business.

Introducing automation will then be seen as an investment because it should now be clear what the return will be.

Logic Replace develops custom web-based tools that are 100% focused on providing the automation that a business needs for all related departments. We call it a Business Operating System (BOS). Our BOS, therefore, deliver business benefits and a clear ROI.

Review and feedback

When a company introduces a new workflow, the business will experience benefits right away.

That is not the end, and it is common for tweaks and adjustments to be required as time progresses.

An exemplary implementation will include regular analysis of how the workflows are performing. As new inefficiencies arise or business changes cause inefficiencies, you can continually change the workflow to eliminate the bottlenecks.

Using Logic Replace’s Business Operating System to leverage automation

Each custom BOS development we deliver is unique and powerful for our clients. Partnering with Logic Replace allows us to create a custom solution that supports your business goals.

Typically our custom BOS development projects deliver either private portals or B2B or B2C solutions; each can interface to any external system or database. These secure solutions allow teams to work on business processes and workflows efficiently and provide management reporting to give the big picture.

If you are interested in this topic and our custom development solutions, get in contact for an informal chat.