Business processes in a business can sometimes be overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in running a small business.
Processes are the backbone of any business. If you lack the experience necessary to manage day-to-day operations, you’ll need to implement a business process in your small business. Implementing a business process in your small company can help you streamline operations, reduce errors, and increase productivity.
Read on to learn about the top benefits of implementing a business process in your small company.
How Your Small Company cAN Benefit From Business Process
Business processes in a business can sometimes be overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in running a small business.
Processes are the backbone of any business. If you lack the experience necessary to manage day-to-day operations, you’ll need to implement a business process in your small business. Implementing a business process in your small company can help you streamline operations, reduce errors, and increase productivity.
Read on to learn about the top benefits of implementing a business process in your small company.
Improve productivity and quality
Business processes can help improve productivity and quality in your company by helping you increase efficiency. For example, you can streamline operations in your accounting department by standardizing the way you manage accounts receivable. This will help you quickly identify any issues, such as an increase in accounts receivable outside the norm. Business processes also help increase efficiency in other areas of your small business, including your purchasing department, marketing department, and HR department.
Also, when operations are documented, business owners can identify ways to improve productivity and quality. If the documentation is done well, it enables other employees to enter and exit the operations with a minimum of training. It also motivates staff to learn new tasks because they know that everything they need to know is already documented.
Unfortunately, many small businesses don’t take the time to document their processes. They don’t understand why they should do it, and they don’t know where to start.
Why document your processes? There are several reasons:
It will help you understand them better. Most business owners have just enough knowledge of their operations to get by. But if you really want to understand your operations and identify areas for improvement, you need to step back and look at your processes from a high-level view. When you document your processes, you’ll see them in a whole new light, and that’s when real improvement occurs.
Reduce operating costs
The most important thing you can do in your business is to establish a strategy and set of business processes that you will use to guide your business to success.
In the beginning, small businesses are often run informally and sometimes even totally by the seat of the pants. As a business grows, however, an owner needs to be thinking about how to formalize systems so that the company can operate more efficiently and with less direct involvement from the owner.
As a small business grows, owners must begin to think about turning over tasks to focus on the big picture. For example, instead of answering customer questions or handling customer complaints themselves, an owner might hire a customer service representative to handle those tasks. By hiring someone else to take care of these jobs, the owner is freed to do other activities such as marketing or planning for future growth.
Another way business processes make a small business more efficient is by eliminating redundancy. If multiple people are doing similar work or one person’s work has to be redone by another employee, too much time and money are being used up. For example, if one employee deals with new customers while another handles existing customers, there might be an overlap between those two jobs that could be eliminated. By eliminating overlap, you reduce the cost of paying different employees working on the same project.
Better customer service
Business processes can help improve customer service through more standardized processes, like standardizing how you collect and manage customer feedback. Standardizing the way you handle customer complaints and troubleshooting will help you provide better service to your clients and improve client satisfaction.
Business processes create consistency and quality in a business’s services, which makes it easier for employees to serve customers well.
When customers purchase a product or service from your business, they expect certain things. For example, when you buy gas at your local gas station, you expect the gas pump to be clean and full of gas, that the credit card machine works and that you’ll get a receipt. When you go to the grocery store, you expect fresh produce and that there will be enough cashiers to get you through the line quickly. Business processes make all of these things happen consistently.
In addition to ensuring your customers receive quality products and services from your business, business processes also help employees do their jobs better by creating consistency in how work is done. This is especially important for small businesses where there aren’t many employees who can share knowledge on how to do things right.
Business processes create consistency in how work gets done. Processes ensure that every employee knows exactly what they need to do — they don’t have to guess how something should be done or rely on another employee knowing the right way. When an employee moves on or takes an extended leave, there’s no delay in getting work done because someone else does not.
Reduce errors and fraud
Business processes are companies’ practices and procedures to get things done. They ensure that tasks are performed correctly, every time, in a consistent manner.
It’s essential to have business processes in place for many reasons, but accuracy and fraud prevention are two of the most important.
If you’re doing something repeatedly without a process in place, chances are you’ll make mistakes from time to time. A process can help you eliminate these mistakes.
For example, if your company hires employees, there will be an onboarding process that includes paperwork for the new hire to complete and various forms to be submitted. If all of these things happen automatically and consistently every time, nothing will be forgotten or left out. Systems like payroll are often automated so that mistakes aren’t made each pay period.
Business processes also help prevent fraud by ensuring that proper controls around sensitive areas like payroll or inventory management are put in place. For example, in order to run payroll, you might need two signatures on the checks each pay period. To make changes to inventory levels, you might need a unique password or key card and the ability to access the inventory management software.
Help employees work together.
Business processes can help employees work together through the standardization of processes. Standardization can help you standardize work processes, including processes related to staff schedules, work communications, and work management. Standardizing these processes can help you collaborate more efficiently, improving your team’s ability to work together.
Business processes help employees work together. When you have a series of steps or procedures in place to guide the way that employees interact with each other, it prevents confusion and allows everyone to stay focused on their job. Without business processes in place, employees often spend time asking each other questions and waiting for answers, which leads to a loss of productivity.
Business processes standardize operations. When you have written procedures for how your employees do their jobs, it makes it easier to train new staff members. It also helps you create an internal policy similar from office to office if you operate multiple locations. Business processes can also simplify the process of expanding your small business or opening new offices because you will have written records of how things should be done.
Business processes make it easier to scale your company. When your procedures are written down and follow consistent guidelines, it is much easier to add new employees without disrupting the flow of business operations. Additionally, suppose you decide to franchise your company or license its products or services. In that case, a company with well-defined business processes has the advantage over companies that don’t have written procedures because they make franchise agreements less expensive and complicated.
Help employees work smarter.
Business processes can help enable employees to work smarter through standardization. Standardizing processes can help your employees standardize their work. This standardization can help encourage employees to work smarter by standardizing their work.
Standardizing processes related to your employee’s work can enable them to specialize their work, helping them remain focused and efficient.
Measure and track performance
Performance measurement is a critical part of running a business, but it’s easy to get lost in many metrics.
It’s essential to measure the right things. There are two types of metrics: leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are predictive — they help you figure out which direction you’ll be heading in. Lagging indicators tell you about the past.
Leading Indicators
Leading indicators can help you spot problems or opportunities before they become catastrophic or unsustainable. You can use leading indicators to set goals for your business and monitor its performance over time, both of which are vital parts of a small business management plan.
Some leading indicators include:
- Sales leads (the number and quality of prospects that come through your sales pipeline)
- Customer retention rate (the percentage of customers who repeat their purchases)
- Average order size (the amount that customers spend per purchase)
- Traffic (customers who visit your store or website)
If you sell online, traffic can be measured by the number of visitors to your website, while if you run a physical store, traffic is measured by the number of people who walk through the door. If you’re in an industry with repetitive sales, such as health insurance or car insurance, traffic might also.
Define your company culture
Last but certainly not least, business processes can help define your company culture. As a business leader, you should be asking yourself: How can I make my company culture stronger and more effective? What’s the best way to preserve and evolve our culture as we grow?
Your business processes are one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal for creating a solid company culture.
Simply put, a process is anything that repeatedly happens within a business. This could be as simple as signing off on an expense report or approving time off to something as complex as onboarding new employees. In fact, the cumulative effect of these smaller processes determines how the company operates. They dictate how work gets done.
For example, suppose you want your company to be more data-driven. In that case, you might set up a normal check-in process between managers and employees so they can take stock of progress against goals and review any available performance data. Or, if you want to build up a more collaborative culture, you might tweak your recruiting process to bring in candidates with diverse experiences or skill sets.
Conclusion
The benefits of implementing a business process are clear. Business processes can help improve productivity and quality, reduce operating costs, better serve clients, reduce errors and fraud, enable employees to work smarter, and enable your company to define its culture. The advantages of implementing business processes in your small company are numerous and well worth the effort.