Business Process Improvement

Your business process, a critical aspect of efficiently progressing from Point A to B and delivering on your customer commitments, can greatly benefit from business process improvement. Is the path your company takes as streamlined as possible, or do your employees unnecessarily add steps or duplicate their efforts along the way?

Business Process Improvement (BPI) Slashes Inefficiencies

We can assist you in optimizing your business process by thoroughly examining your journey from start to finish. We’ll create process maps and a comprehensive report, followed by meetings with your team to review our findings and collaboratively devise solutions that enhance the overall process.

Every business sells, produces, and delivers a product or service to its clients, and each company’s business process includes the unique steps taken to do this. Even if two businesses are selling exactly the same product or service, their business processes won’t be exactly the same.

Processes are developed in response to demands imposed by clients, internal management, or government and other oversight agencies. Within these overall processes, the company’s divisions and departments have sub-processes that are part of the overall path to the endpoint.

Most employees complete their part of the process to the best of their abilities. This is called local optimization, and it often contributes to inefficiencies in the overall process.

Inefficiencies are introduced because employees may not be aware of how their actions impact downstream processes. Each person may do the best possible job within their area of responsibility without understanding what happened before and what needs to happen after work leaves their hands. Here are two examples of how doing your best can cause process problems.

Problem: Sales reported at the weekly management meetings always exceeded sales reported from the system at month end. We verified that the month end reports from the system were correct. Why the mis-match?

Identification of Issues:

Company rewarded employees based on month-end sales counts.

Weekly sales meetings assumed a linear accumulation of sales, leading to discrepancies.

Underlying Causes:

Managers sourced weekly sales counts from salespeople, not system reports.

Some sales were not entered into the system promptly due to time constraints and potential cancellations.

Optimistic salespeople delayed entering cancellations, impacting system accuracy.

Last-minute entries and cancellations skewed weekly numbers but corrected month-end figures.

Solution:

Aligning reward and reporting cycles.

Weekly meetings incorporated system data, including sales and cancellations.

System updated to track entry dates for sales and cancellations.

Simplified requirements for immediate sales entry.

Categorized and reported cancellation reasons for better understanding and reduction.

Outcome:

Shift from a perceived reporting problem to a process issue.

Investment in process analysis led to more accurate sales information.

Reduction in cancellation rates through improved processes and timely data entry.

Problem: A manufacturer took 90+ days to provide clients with an estimate to build a new product. By taking so long to create a price quote, the company was losing orders for existing products along with new opportunities, as frustrated customers selected new manufacturers for all their items.

What was happening? Before Octopus Technologies began conducting interviews with the employees involved in the process, management provided an overview of how requests for new product pricing were handled. Here are the steps they defined.

Unearthed Information During Interviews:

Communication with customers occurred throughout the process, involving all departments.

Updates triggered rerouting through departments, causing delays.

Responsibility handoff occurred at each department, leading to unnecessary information generation.

Management review frequently prompted complete quote rework.

Employees had conflicting production responsibilities during the quoting process.

Solution:

Delegation of authority for the new product estimation process to one team.

Removal of unnecessary tasks, such as engineering’s time-consuming spreadsheet.

Introduction of a cross-functional team review at the process beginning to minimize late-stage questions.

Centralized handling of customer queries by the new estimation team, streamlining updates.

Outcome:

Process maps, findings documentation, and team meeting facilitated shared understanding.

Changes led to a reduction in the new product process to 30 days or less.

Improved ownership and continuous improvements by the designated process owner.

Often business problems are not caused by a lack of employee motivation, knowledge, or data. Sometimes each department is doing outstanding work within their own silo without understanding how they fit into the overall process.

Maybe your business has accurate sales numbers and doesn’t take 90 days to price a new product, but every business has processes that can be improved.

Sometimes people will try to convince you that software solves business process issues. Don’t listen to them. The best software in the world can’t fix broken processes, and the wrong software makes bad processes worse.

Business process improvement is independent of computer software. If you analyze and improve your business processes before you buy software, you’ll have a clearer picture of your requirements, and you’ll end up with a solution that fits your company’s needs.

At Teximus, we have used our business process improvement methodology to facilitate more than 50 process improvement projects here in Vancouver, throughout the country, and around the world. We’ve worked with a variety of transportation, manufacturing, construction, medical, and service clients to streamline and optimize their business processes.

At Teximus, we love solving problems. Call us at 778-200-5336 to find out more about how your company can use Teximus’s process improvement expertise to solve your business problems.

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Business Process Improvement