Process Optimization Drives Operational Excellence

Process Optimization Drives Operational Excellence

Efficiency has a direct impact on employee productivity. The easiest and best option to maintain peak productivity is to optimize your processes constantly.

What is process optimization?

Process optimization is the discipline of adjusting a process to optimize (make the best or most effective use of) some specified set of parameters. The most common optimization goals are minimizing cost and maximizing throughput and/or efficiency.

When optimizing a process, the goal is to maximize one or more of the process specifications, while keeping all others within their constraints. This can be done by discovering the critical activities and bottlenecks and acting only on them.

What is business process optimization?

Business process optimization is the practice of increasing organizational efficiency by improving processes. It’s a part of the discipline of business process management (BPM). Optimized processes lead to optimized business goals.

Some examples of optimization include:

• Eliminating redundancies
• Streamlining workflows
• Improving communication
• Forecasting changes

The rewards of optimizing business processes

Your organization is in constant competition and most likely threatened by other organizations, disruptive technologies, and changing norms.

Optimizing business processes offers many benefits that can help businesses stay afloat by achieving:

• Market compliance
• Streamlined operations
• Reduced risks
• Well-utilized resources
• Consistency
• Assured quality
• End-to-end visibility

Steps to implement business process optimization

Planning is essential to make the most out of your business process optimization effort. Here’s a brief step-by-step guide to help you carry out a process optimization plan.

Step 1: Identify

Pick a problematic process you want to optimize. Define the purpose and goals.

Step 2: Analyze

Is the process meeting desired goals? Is there excess wastage you need to remove?

Step 3: Implement

Once you get rid of unnecessary elements, automate the revised process in its new form.

Step 4: Monitor

Take a micro and macro look at process performance and fine-tune it until you get desired results.

Real world process optimization

Here are a few real-life examples of how business process optimization can increase efficiency.

Purchase orders

Multiple purchase orders clog the queue of the purchasing department. The department senses this problem is due to email approvals. To streamline requests, the department deploys a dedicated workflow management system. The workflow system lets employees choose the item and send it for approvals automatically.

Travel reimbursement

The finance department makes frequent errors when reimbursing expenses. Since the entire process is paper-based, they misread numbers and reimburse the wrong amount to employees. To fix this, the department moved to a digital system where employees fill the amount in form fields. There are no processing errors this way.

Employee onboarding

Onboarding a new employee happens in a sequence of steps. The HR executives send the employee agreement over email. After the employee signs it, the next step to provision assets in IT should proceed. But each time the HR manually sends a mail to IT to provision laptops and grant access to tools. To make the process faster, an email trigger is set up. Once the employee signs and sends the employee agreement, an email is automatically sent to IT.

How eBizDOcs can help your organization

eBizDocs helps you improve your process optimization efforts with ease. Sometimes seeing the forest through the trees requires a fresh set of eyes. Our document process analysis gives you a comprehensive review of how information is created, controlled, and flown through the organization. It’s amazing how a few minor suggestions are welcome and can dramatically improve efficiency. However, if you are already at maximum efficiency, we’ll tell you that too! Just an unbiased review that sets the benchmark of where you are and what, if anything, can be improved.

Taking the next step

Let’s start a fact finding, no obligation, conversation about your goals and objectives.