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Whether you're a small business owner, startup founder, or executive at a large company, a business process can send your business into ruin. In the old days, you could assign tasks and expect them to be completed within set deadlines.
Today, that's no longer enough if you want your business to stay afloat, outperform the competition, or cut costs. That's where business process mapping, modeling, development, and management come into play. However, before you abandon the idea altogether, let me walk you through the basics and demonstrate that business processes are not that complicated, and in turn can be a significant benefit to your company.
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What is a business process?
The definition of business processes says: "A business process is a series of connected actions assigned to specific stakeholders designed to achieve a stated goal or produce value."
In other words, it is a set of steps that individual employees must take to deliver value to the customer. Flowcharts of all kinds are the usual way to visualize the business process and can include different amounts of data. The simplest form is a top-down flowchart, although swimlane and statecharts are also popular, along with data flow diagrams and value stream mapping.
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Let's dive into the inner workings of business processes to make sure you fully understand the concept before trying your hand at business process management or process automation.
Why are business processes important?
At first glance, it seems that business processes are nothing more than an additional way to complicate daily operations and increase bureaucracy. The amount of documentation and reports required can intimidate you and discourage you from developing and implementing business processes in your daily operations. Before making the final decision, consider the difference:
| Before implementing business processes |
Post-deployment of business processes |
| Bad time management on a business scale. Your employees waste too much time and resources to complete each step and continually miss deadlines, driving up operating costs and losing customers. | Efficient time management in all areas. Each employee is aware of the role in generating value and performs the duties according to a clear flowchart. Time and resources are used efficiently, with minimal drag between team members. |
| Unsatisfactory performance and low level of motivation among employees. Team members find themselves in positions they are not qualified for, leading to bottlenecks, poor performance, and overall low morale. Increased employee turnover is just one of the negative consequences that the company will face. | High performance and satisfaction rates among team members, along with a reduction in human error. Throughout the development of the business process, employees are assigned to positions where they can generate the most value and use their full potential. Tasks are assigned to team members who specialize in them, increasing overall business performance and reducing risk. |
| The company repeats the same mistakes and does not implement the necessary changes to improve operations. The lack of standardized processes and regular reviews prevents the team from recognizing recurring issues and making improvements to daily operations. The vicious cycle of repeating mistakes could ultimately lead to bankruptcy. | The company implements the most efficient ways to produce value and quickly adapts to new challenges. Risk assessment is at the core of business process development and enables companies to reduce long-term operational risks. Adopting new technologies to automate or scale existing processes is just one-way companies can manage the changing market landscape or customer preferences. |
| Employees engage in heavy lifting and produce no real value, which drives up operating expenses and drives up the net cost. Without accountability and performance metrics, team members don't realize their place in the value-creation framework. Customer satisfaction is far from their minds as long as it doesn't affect their salary. | Each member of the team is aware of their responsibilities and is responsible for both successes and mistakes. Employees can improve their performance thanks to comprehensive metrics. They are motivated to improve productivity and create more value for customers to receive bonuses. |
Types of business processes
Not all business processes are the same. Some generate immediate value, while others are necessary for daily operations. Traditionally, three types of business processes are recognized:
- Core (or key) business process: This essential set of processes adds value to the company's offerings and delivers the product to customers. Examples of key business processes include product development, product delivery, customer acquisition, and more.
- Business process support: Unlike primary processes, processes in this category do not directly create value. However, they create an environment for the efficient operation of core processes and support daily business needs. Examples of supporting business processes include acquisition, employee onboarding, development, and satisfaction.
- Management business process: This set of processes involves setting business goals and developing operational standards that support the efficiency of primary and support processes. Strategic, tactical, and operational planning, monitoring, and control are examples of managing business processes.
It can be tempting to focus your efforts on developing and improving core processes at the expense of supporting and managing business processes. However, without them, your company will not be able to consistently generate value and will ultimately succumb to chaos.
Business process development steps
If you have just discovered the need to implement business processes in your company, this simple step-by-step guide should be enough to get you started. We won't go into details and will keep the process generic enough to be applicable in any industry or market.
- Establish the goal you want to achieve: The purpose of the process must be measurable and have clear deliverables. If you don't understand how to assess the success of the process, you should further narrow down the goal.
- Plan the strategies to achieve the objectives you set for yourself: In this step, you should obtain an overview of the operations and resources that you will need to implement or use to achieve the objective.
- Define individual tasks: Use your strategy map to identify each small action that your team must take to achieve the objective of the business process. You must also assign each task to individual stakeholders and provide them with the necessary resources, including hardware and software.
- Perform a test run: Test the process under real conditions. Get feedback from interested and involved parties, observe bottlenecks and problems, and adjust the initial process to prevent them.
- Deploy the business process: Once you're satisfied with the test results, scale the process and use it in a live environment. To make sure all stakeholders are on the same page, set up an efficient communication and training framework.
- Keep track of results: Don't leave the business process to its own devices. Monitor results, review metrics, and analyze patterns. You should also document any changes to the process.
- Repeat: If your business process achieves the goals of step 1, analyze the success factors and duplicate them in future operations development. If the objectives are not met, review the methodology and consider modifying the approach.
Once you've established your primary, support, and management processes, you can combine the best of business processes and information systems to automate these processes and a host of other ways to improve your operations to lower costs and increase profits.
It is important to understand that business processes can never be static and immutable. They must adapt, improve and scale according to your current goals. With the deliberate implementation of business processes and constraints, you can take your business to the next level.
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