Process improvement, often referred to as business process improvement, is the practice of exploring ways to make the existing processes of a business more dependable, efficient and accurate. As Gina Temple says, business process improvement must be considered to be an ongoing practice, instead of just a one-time action. Process improvement in business is often focused on identifying opportunities or problems in existing processes, create solutions, and ultimately apply those solutions to the relevant processes with the goal of optimizing them.
Gina Temple offers an introduction to process improvement and its importance
Each and every company depends on distinctive types of business processes for powering its operations. Starting from employee on-boarding and resolving issues in IT systems to issuing or receiving payments, there would be a process in place behind everything a company does. If the business processes take too much time to complete, deliver inconsistent results or require more resources than planned for, a company may experience a process breakdown. This would make the operations of an enterprise less effective. An inaccurate or inefficient process often costs businesses a good amount of money every year. Implementation of process improvements is vital to solve this issue. The benefits of process improvement are many, including:
- Time savings: By streamlining and reducing the number of steps involved, process improvement can help lower the time it takes to complete a variety of business critical tasks.
- Improved results: Process improvements can help instigate improved results, like clearer process milestones and tasks, and even enhanced employee performance.
- Better customer satisfaction: Process improvement can result in faster and more effective customer service, high quality standards and meeting every deadline. It can also help improve customer outcomes across the board.
- Increased transparency and alignment: Making sure everyone understands each step in a process is crucial for ensuring that team members are aware of their responsibilities. This clarity also facilitates seamless information sharing and efficient collaboration among team members.
- Reduced waste: Doing away with redundant processes or tasks that consume valuable time and resources is an important aspect of process improvement. It helps make sure that a company is wasting as little time and money as possible.
Continuous process improvement is vital to solving problems by breaking up improvement tasks into smaller and manageable chunks that occur on a rolling basis, instead of large sweeps or when the tasks become too extensive to manage. As Gina Temple says, this not only helps the time and resources of a company, but also helps its teams to get ahead of any potential, process-specific concerns before they can become larger company-wide risks. Continuous process improvement involves proactively seeking and identifying opportunities to enhance or fix current business processes, rather than waiting for problems to escalate. By making continuous process improvement an ongoing practice, organizations can operate their processes more efficiently and effectively over time.
One of the biggest challenges associated with improving business processes is feeling overwhelmed before the improvements even begin. Such an attitude can impact how well improvements are implemented, and can also hamper stakeholder buy-in. It is a prudent move, therefore, to limit the number of improvement initiatives being considered for implementation, and start off on a smaller scale prior to taking on larger improvements.
