Managing Business Processes – Your Condensed Guide

Managing Business Processes

Processes sit at the heart of every organisation, providing structure and consistency to activities and performance. Therefore, it is essential to ensure business processes are well thought out and fit for purpose. This can be achieved and continuously supported with the right management. Investing in business process management can result in numerous benefits, including:

Improved customer experience
Cost savings
Increased efficiency and productivity
Reduced risk from non-compliance
Improved quality and consistency
Increased business agility
Less staff turn over

Processes we’ve helped other organisations manage

Customer and Supplier onboarding/offboarding
Joiners, Movers, Leavers (JML)
Contract Management
Sales and Purchase Order Processing

Organisations are inundated with processes. However, managing these processes is not simply a case of creating process diagrams and putting them in a folder on a shelf. Managing business processes effectively is far more involved than that and requires a commitment to a cultural shift. Undertaking steps to effectively manage your business processes will ultimately support your organisation in achieving a competitive edge and cultivating a happier working environment.

What are the first steps?

So, you’re starting to consider changing the way you manage your processes. Your first steps on this journey should include:

Evaluating and understanding how well you currently manage business processes
Identifying if or where improvement is needed and what these improvements might be
Attaining top-to-bottom buy into the cultural shift required to achieve process excellence
Devising and communicating a plan
Taking tangible action

What does this look like in practice?

The first action is to put in place a suitable governance structure, identifying the individuals within your organisation most appropriate to drive things forward and then define parameters for these people to work within and give these individuals the time and resources they require. Although key figures will be identified, it is vital that everyone in the organisation understands that they have a role to play.

The next step is to understand your current process landscape, within and across departments. This will help you to identify suitable quick wins that can be actioned. Once these quick wins have been identified, key individuals need to collaborate in order to ascertain a single, agreed understanding of what these processes will look like – you’d be amazed at how many different interpretations of the same process there can be.

Once the baseline work has been done to achieve your quick wins, it is then important to identify areas in need of improvement and create plans of action to improve these. This can be applied outwards to all business processes as appropriate. However, it is important to remember that process management is an iterative and continuous task, these steps will need to be repeated in response to regular reviews and feedback.

With clear process owners, easy visibility into processes, and an ethos of continued improvement, your organisation can improve efficiency, productivity, and consistency. This in turn not only reduces non-compliance but fosters a working environment in which operations run smoothly and process information is easy to access. This in turn supports employee happiness and productivity, reducing employee turnover.

With clear process owners, easy visibility into processes, and an ethos of continued improvement, your organisation can improve efficiency, productivity, and consistency. This is turn not only reduces non-compliancy but fosters a working environment in which operations run smoothly and process information is easy to access. This in turn supports employee happiness and productivity, reducing employee turnover.

Who can help me develop a business process management initiative?

Synergi is a business transformation consultancy working with clients of all shapes and sizes across the UK. One of our priorities is working with organisations to help them understand, manage and improve business processes as part of a journey towards process excellence. As a cloud solutions and managed services provider, Synergi can guide organisations, suggesting the tools most appropriate to support their needs. Synergi can help organisations drastically improve their process management with the ultimate aim of process excellence. If you’d like to talk with our experts about this, click on the link below to complete a ‘Contact Me’ form.