Improve Processes to Save Money and Increase Efficiency

Published - Jul 19, 2022

Your business processes are what standardise your customer experience and prevent errors. Having an easy-to-follow system in place allows your employees to perform their job without oversight. Creating processes is important to your business growth, but it should not be a singular task. You should review your processes regularly to ensure they are as efficient and cost-effective as they can be.

Think about it; your processes are carried out multiple times a day, every day of the week. Saving time or money in your processes can add up to substantial savings each month and year.

How to Review Your Business Processes

Set time aside on a regular basis to review your business processes and determine if there is room for improvement. Look for ways to:

• Reduce spending
• Automate part or all of the process
• Outsource tasks
• Save time
• Improve customer experience
• Improve clarity
• Simplify the process

Incremental improvements will streamline your operations and afford huge savings to resources across your company. Here are the steps to follow when reviewing your business processes.

Gather Data

The first step of reviewing your business processes is to gather as much data about your business processes as possible. Review the analytics for any software involved in the process and talk to all stakeholders about their experience with the business process. Your staff will be your best resource for identifying issues or inefficiencies in your business processes. Encourage them to provide honest feedback on where your processes can be improved.

Look For Automations

Technology is a business owner’s best friend. New software designed to streamline business processes and generally make life easier is released every month. Look to see if there is a technology solution to automate repetitive tasks so you can allocate your employees’ time to tasks that produce higher ROI for your business. Something as simple as auto-populating information can reclaim hours of your employees’ time.

While you’re reviewing processes that don’t have a technology solution in place, review your current technology solutions to see if there are better options. Your previous CRM or invoicing tool may have been the best option when you purchased it, but there may be better solutions on the market now. Collect data from your employees and analytics to identify any issues or inefficiencies with your current software solutions and see if there is another product that can solve those for you.

Identify New Ideas

Your employees are your best asset. Encourage your employees to challenge and question your processes. Yes, you have processes in place to standardise operations, but encourage your employees to share any ideas they have for improvements. They may have found a more efficient way of doing things or have insight into a more suitable process or system.

You hired these people because they are experts at what they do. They have experience with different methods and technology from their previous roles; tap into that knowledge.

Create an environment where all employees are encouraged to propose improvements to business processes. You never know what gems may come from their insights.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Before committing to a process change, conduct a cost-benefit analysis to calculate the quality of the solution. Don’t forget the following factors:

It may not be appropriate to improve all business processes. Your cost-benefit analysis may show that the cost of an improvement greatly outweighs the size of the inefficiency. Therefore the ROI is insufficient to warrant a change. Keep a record of the inefficiency; it may be something that is more cost-effective to solve in the future.

Solution Testing

Before you spend resources rolling out widespread changes to business processes, test a solution in a much smaller environment. Ask one or a small group of small employees to test a new process and provide feedback. This will give you data on how easy or difficult it is to adapt to the changes and whether they see efficiencies or not. Some process changes may lead to errors, so you can gather more data for your cost-benefit analysis on the financial implications of errors while you transition to the new business processes.

This will allow you to decide if you want to return to your previous processes or roll out the improvements.

Process Improvements That Will Save Your Business Time and Money

If you’re unsure where to start, here are some ways all businesses can improve their processes:

Going Paperless

Digitising as many processes as possible is a huge opportunity for businesses to save on resources. Identify overlooked areas like contracts and paperwork, scheduling, and communication. Going paperless can have unexpected benefits, like:

• Saving time locating files and information
• Reducing storage costs
• Securing sensitive data
• Keeping tax and legal records
• Restricting access to unauthorised personnel
• Saving costs of producing and sending clients copies
• Improving the ease of collaboration
• Allowing employees to access files remotely

Automating Tasks

Look for ways you can take repetitive and time-consuming tasks off your employees’ to do lists completely by automating them. You can achieve this through technology by creating software that streamlines business processes. You can also achieve this by creating mini scripts or templates. This reduces time on communication, standardises customer and vendor experience, and ensures all pertinent information is communicated. For example, you could create templates for IT requests to save your IT department time on investigating issues. Another example of a template is a customer service template where your customer service staff have a template or guidelines on the information they need to collect from the customer. These templates may only save a minute or two, but that time saving will be multiplied by the number of times that process is performed in a day.

Review Packages

Review the packages you are subscribed to and see if there is a package that better suits your needs. You may be able to upgrade a package that would make your processes more efficient, or you may be able to downgrade because you don’t need all the features included.

Outsourcing Tasks

Outsourcing tasks to experts is a fantastic way to access experience for a fraction of the cost of hiring an employee. You get results that are:

• Higher quality
• Delivered faster
• Done by experts

The expert will often provide additional insights into opportunities your business can pursue. For example, they may spot potential issues and propose solutions before they become a problem. They could also help you to further streamline processes. When you build a relationship with these experts through regular outsourcing, they become a much bigger asset for your business than anticipated.

Posted in Finance on Jul 19, 2022