How to Make Your Business Processes More Efficient

You may generally keep your hands off your business process budgets because that's how you get things done. But do you really know the key steps in those processes? And you may know approximately where your process inefficiencies reside, but until you really examine them, you won't know for sure, wrote Walter T. Gee on Small Business CEO recently. He said that “the key is to objectively and creatively find ways to streamline these processes by combining or eliminating unnecessary, repetitive, or duplicate tasks.” He calls it a do-more-with-less plan. Gather up the operations leaders and examine every step. Gee has a checklist:

• Describe the process. “Define the current the process,” Gee said. “Bring stakeholders together to develop an accurate description of the way the current process works.”
• Take the process apart. “Question why current tasks are performed in a particular way or why workflows follow a particular path,” Gee wrote.
• Put the process back together. “Focus on identifying improvements that lead to enhanced quality of service, better throughput and response times, and lower processing costs,” Gee said.
• Use technology. “When deployed effectively,” Gee added, “technology offers opportunities to automate manual and repetitive tasks.”
• Do it all again regularly. “An ongoing, continuous effort ingrained in your business culture is the key to sustaining process improvement,” Gee said.

Read the entire article at Small Business CEO.