5 ways to improve your business processes

Whether you’re a senior leader, line manager, or small business owner, you undoubtedly recognize the impact of business processes on a company’s success. You likely also realize how important it is to keep striving for process perfection, which requires continually improving business processes over time. But how do you do this effectively?

Below, we walk through several ways to make improving business processes a little easier. Adding their insights are Aaron Alpeter and Joshua Murphy. Alpeter is the founder of izba, a supply chain consulting, outsourcing, and technology firm. Murphy is a business consultant at Luaak Solutions, a company that offers integration and automation services.

1. Seek input from people unfamiliar with the process

“In many ways, the hardest part is knowing where to start or what to optimize,” says Alpeter. “Don’t underestimate the value of a fresh perspective, whether that’s from inside or outside the company.”

Who should you ask for input on processes? You have a few options:

• New hires: Employees who are just getting started with your company will naturally have questions about how things work. Encourage these questions and use them to identify potential improvements in processes, especially older ones.
• Managers: Shuffling managers around to different responsibility areas can often help them see work from a fresh perspective and pinpoint useful process changes.
• Consultants: Sometimes your best bet for improving business processes is hiring an external consultant or consulting firm to systematically review and identify process improvements. Not only do you get an outsider’s perspective, but you also benefit from the specialized experience.

2. Centralize process-related information

When information is scattered across systems and people, process timelines tend to be longer. People have to hunt down the information they need, which can create unnecessary bottlenecks.

“Keeping information organized in one centralized location can significantly cut down process completion time,” Murphy explains. “For example, if you have a system that connects all customer data — notes, call histories, recordings, and other important files — employees can access what they need in one place.”

3. Automate process areas where feasible

If you have a process with manual, repetitive tasks, it may be suitable for automation — a technological approach that reduces or eliminates the need for human involvement. “Automating processes saves time and enables employees to focus on more important responsibilities,” says Murphy.

Automation comes in many forms. For example, your marketing team could use automations to send campaign emails to customers. In addition, your support team could implement chatbots to help resolve low-level customer issues.

4. Implement relevant solutions

Specific solutions can often jumpstart your process improvement efforts, especially when a solution can tackle multiple process pain points. For example, Jotform, a powerful form builder, offers a wide variety of templates to meet the needs of multiple functional areas. These customizable templates help automate the process of collecting, organizing, and visualizing data to inform decision making.

Consider a few areas where Jotform can help:

• HR: Find templates to aid in hiring, onboarding, and employee management.
• Sales: From leveraging order forms to new customer contracts, the sales team can do a lot with Jotform.
• Marketing: Your marketing team can create valuable surveys and questionnaires.
• Customer support: Customer service managers can benefit from user surveys, complaint forms, and more.
• IT: Whether it’s bug and issue reporting or internal support requests, Jotform has a form for that.

5. Remember to address change management

It’s not enough to simply change processes. You also have to change people — their knowledge, skills, mindset, and more. Processes can only produce your desired results when the people responsible for those processes are behaving as intended.

“Be aware of the law of inertia in a change management context — people will do as they’ve always done unless properly trained and motivated to do otherwise,” Alpeter explains. He notes that combatting inertia tends to be an issue in larger organizations that have multiple layers of communication, which makes disseminating information and confirming everyone understands it more challenging. “Meanwhile, smaller organizations are typically nimbler, sometimes communicating and implementing changes the same day.”

Companies interested in improving business processes can achieve their goals in a variety of ways, as the above points indicate. However, Alpeter cautions against following any one business improvement method verbatim. “I would encourage people to focus on the principle or concept of a given method. Each company is unique and has cultural and communication distinctions that need to be accounted for when trying to improve processes.”

When it comes to improving business processes, there’s a multitude of ways to get the job done. Mix and match the ones above, but don’t be afraid to come up with a few ways of your own that fit your organization.

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