7th January 2025
It can be hard to truly see the effect your changes are having on your business until a lot later.
You might be cutting costs on what you discover is the wrong thing, or you might be overspending on a tool that is not truly worth it, even if it seems like it is.
The best way to tell if your changes are having any effect? Numbers.
To truly arrive at business process improvement, you need to pay attention to the numbers and measure it constantly. Let’s dig into how.
Firstly, let’s understand what is meant by business process improvement.
We’ve written about business process optimisation in the past, a practice focused on efficiency and cutting costs above all.
Business process improvement is similar, except the end goal is to arrive at overall success. Cutting costs is more of a side effect than a final goal of the re-engineering process that takes place.
The concept of continuous process improvement has become the norm that most companies strive for.
Essentially, you are continuously studying and analysing your process to make them as efficient and successful as possible. Everything a client is paying you should be reflected in the various steps of your process for it to be worth it.
Anything extraneous to this can be studied and improved upon, such as wait times, resourcing locations, certain tasks, or documentation.
Everyone involved in your business, from top to bottom, should be aware of how the work they do impacts your business goals. By involving them directly, you can ensure that everyone is constantly thinking about how they might do their job better.
While at first, this may seem simple enough, it is trickier than you might think. A business process map to help you visualise how your business is working, using software such as Liberty Spark, our process improvement solution, is just the start.
It should go without saying that analytics and numbers are incredibly important for business process improvement.
But what type of analytics might you use for improvement purposes? Here are some examples:
Firstly, you can use analytics to improve employee productivity and engagement. By studying your workers workflows and patterns, and engaging with them, you can learn how to best serve both them and yourself. You can boost morale and productivity as well through making improvements.
Secondly, streamlining operations becomes easier than ever. Without certain KPIs or results to study, it is difficult to truly and conclusively find spots in the process where you feel confident a change will lead to positive results. It’s one thing to have everything mapped out for visualisation purposes, it’s another to also have the corresponding necessary data available to make a decision.
Thirdly, you can track consumer behaviour and improve their customer experience. There is a breadth of data and analytics available regarding consumers that businesses can use to improve customer-facing processes, by personalising their experience, and therefore improving customer satisfaction.
Fourth, based on this same data, and by additionally monitoring changes in the market or industry, businesses can now launch a new product or service confidently. By studying the data, they will know what will appeal to their existing target base and potentially be appealing to a new one. If they’re already changed their existing processes accordingly, they can replicate them and utilise them in this process as well.
Fifth and finally, you can ensure your decision-making is data-driven, which is key for getting stakeholders on board. Sign off is significantly longer from stakeholders if you cannot provide them with explicit, numerical evidence for why you are making those changes. Your processes and improvements would no longer stall when it’s time to make the big decisions.
Evidently, then, analytics is quite an important aspect of business process improvement, and a useful one for measuring how you are doing.
But how can you obtain those necessary numbers?
Evidently, then, analytics is quite an important aspect of business process improvement, and a useful one for measuring how you are doing.
The good thing about Spark is that, besides providing you with an easy-to-use, collaborative business process mapping platform, it also has visual insights to help you have those numbers ready a lot faster.
Both for current analysis and for hypothetical changes, Spark will provide you with the data you need based on your inputs into the tool.
The good thing about Spark is that, besides providing you with an easy-to-use, collaborative business process mapping platform, it also has visual insights to help you have those numbers ready a lot faster.
The good thing about Spark is that, besides providing you with an easy-to-use, collaborative business process mapping platform, it also has visual insights to help you have those numbers ready a lot faster.
Easy to use and understand visual analytics can be narrowed down to four key steps:
First, you map all of your processes in Spark. You can do this online, independently, or in real-time workshops. As Spark is a collaborative platform, everyone can contribute in their own time or in real-time.
Based on UPN all of Spark’s notation is fully standardised, avoiding any misunderstandings which may arise with other other mapping software. This means everyone can contribute without the need for additional knowledge or training. Spark is designed to be used and understood by everyone in the organisational.
Once you have your processes mapped you can begin to add all kinds of information such as durations, direct costs, delays and people costs. With Spark, you can add as much information as is necessary to fully provide a realistic picture of what your processes look like. And it does not clutter your map one bit.
As soon as you start adding information, Spark can start producing insightful dashboards. You will find analytics with all of the data you provided instantly and readily visible, showing the durations of your processes and potential bottlenecks. This will also help you understand costs and how successful you are at matching process activities to revenue.
Finally, you can begin to explore and consider your options. Understand the impact your changes will have by exploring different scenarios. Once you’ve settled on the best one based on your current understanding of your capacity, you can create a business case to present to your shareholders.
If you’ve already mapped all of your processes and have been using Spark for a while, you can also use our analytics to continuously improve on your existing processes. Spark also contains and intelligent process tracker which helps you manage reviews to remind you to constantly check your analytics to study how your improvements are going, and to find new steps to improve as well.
Business process improvement is measured most easily through ROI and business cases. And the way to access this data?
Liberty Spark helps you speedily stay on top of the data on a continuous basis, a key component to achieving business process improvement not just one time but all the time.
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Keep up with regular news from Netcall – you’ll hear about cut-through process automation and communications solutions to help you achieve your business goals faster.
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